Zaha Hadid: making waves

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10 April 2012

You enter Zaha Hadid's sprawling Clerkenwell office, a converted 1870s school, beneath a Victorian sign saying 'Girls, Infants'. Ironic, really. For decades, Hadid was treated as the infantile girl of the architecture world; the woman who couldn't ever get her madly ambitious, wildly impractical, swooshing, diving, steel and glass buildings off the drawing board. Nothing got built, despite her winning competition after competition, notably in 1995 for the Cardiff Bay Opera House, only for her project to be replaced by the Cardiff Millennium Centre. For years she attacked the male architectural establishment in Britain that, she said, stopped her works getting built: the 'old boys' network', the 'brotherhood' that met in gentlemen's clubs and had all the big jobs sewn up. After the Cardiff debacle, she even contemplated giving up architecture altogether.

Well, goodbye to all that. The old boys' network has just welcomed her into the grandest club of all. Earlier this month, the Royal Institute of British Architects awarded her the Stirling Prize, the most prestigious architectural prize in the world. She won with her new building in Rome: MAXXI, the National Museum of the 21st Century Arts. The building is Hadid at her most Hadidesque. Like a deranged, molten, space-age train terminus, MAXXI is all overhanging irregular blocks of concrete punctured with unadorned windows and connected by swirling black escalators and slats of steel curving at drunken angles.

Surely, at last, as she faces her 60th birthday at the end of this month, she has reached a tipping point in her career. Not only is she scooping the big prizes, but she now has 400 people working for her in London, the Middle East and Italy. The great unbuilt architect now has 25 completed projects and a staggering 56 further projects on the go.

'Well, the prize was fun, and I like MAXXI because it ended up very like the drawings, and every line was very calculated,' says Hadid, her generous figure swathed in black – black wrap tucked under her chin, black fingerless gauntlets stretching to her elbows. 'But I think the tipping point came earlier, in the late 1990s, with the Cincinnati Contemporary Art Centre. The work was unusual and out of the mainstream, but then everything else changed, too. Just look at TV and publications and interiors, then look at, say, an MTV set – there was a radical change. I remember seeing an Ikea ad on TV about 15 years ago and they were throwing all the chintz out and putting in new pieces. Look at the interior pages in the Sunday papers then; that also began to change.'

Certainly, Hadid's megapod of a penthouse, also in Clerkenwell, is a chintz-free zone; the clutterphobic modern architect's flat, straight out of central casting. The walls, floor and ceiling are a monochrome white, with black metal-framed windows. All guests take their shoes off on entering, to preserve the pristine cleanliness. There is a crisp rectangular cavity for a fireplace, filled with identical beige pebbles. Black U-shaped vases are sparely stocked with lilies. A black wax candle sits on a curving white table, its surface made up of amoeba-shaped islands of opaque glass. Also on the table is a marooned iPad, standing to attention on its supporting base. All the pictures are of Hadid's projects in different media: on aluminium, in paper relief. The few objects are also designed by her: a curved sofa, a swooping table, a futuristic tea set. There are no books, no CDs, perilously little sign of human occupation. Hadid lives here on her own. She has never married or had children. 'I don't regret it,' she says. 'It would have been nice to, but I've always been too hectic. I think you should only have children if you can give them time. If I'd stayed in the Middle East, I could have done it. The family relationships there make it easier to look after children.'

Hadid was born in Iraq in 1950, the daughter of the leader of the Iraqi Progressive Democratic Party. 'I haven't been back to Iraq for 30 years. I would like to go back – my house is still there. I was always able to go back, it was just difficult to leave. You had to get an exit visa,' she says in her deep, quickfire voice, still accented with her native Arabic and with an American lilt. 'I didn't back the war; I don't believe in war anywhere. Things were very difficult [under Saddam Hussein], but it wasn't the government that stopped me going back. My parents are not there any more. It's very emotional to return to anywhere you grew up that's changed so much.'

She and her two brothers were sent to England for a traditional boarding school education. 'I loved England as a child, though I've never liked the weather.' She knew by the age of ten that she wanted to be an architect and was helped by her well-connected, well-off father, who knew many of the architects in the Middle East. She went on to do a maths degree at Beirut's American University, and an architecture degree at London's Architectural Association in 1972. 'The AA was wonderful,' she says. 'You could see any teacher you wanted. And there was a rare combination of people there at the same time. It was just one of those accidental, magical times.'

Despite Britain's supposed opposition to her buildings, she has lived and worked here for more than a quarter of a century. 'The British still don't look forward enough, but London is the most amazing city, it has everything, including an engineering tradition that goes right back to the Victorian era,' she says. 'My close friends, my important friends, are here.' Hadid's great friends from her AA days remain her intimates; among them Rem Koolhaas, Daniel Libeskind, Will Alsop, Bernard Tschumi and the late Sir James Stirling, in whose name the Stirling Prize is given. 'Culturally, London's still very exciting, particularly over the last ten years. There's Frieze, the expansion of galleries in East London and think about Tate Modern: how few people got to see modern art before that,' says Hadid.

She has always been much influenced by the Russian avant garde, and is on the judging panel for the 2011 Magic of Persia Contemporary Art Prize, to reward artists from Iran and the Persian Diaspora. The winner gets a solo show at the Saatchi Gallery in 2012. 'Arabs and the British think similarly, too. There's a "maybe world", a grey area, an ambiguous area that doesn't exist in Germany or America. It gives you more time, more flexibility. It's not black and white; it's not so rigid. And the Architectural Association had, and has, a rare energy. There was no prejudice against women there.' Her days at the AA were idyllic, and so it was a shock to enter the outside world and be confronted with professional sexism. 'The woman thing has changed a lot in the last 30 years,' she says. 'It's day and night change. It was unusual to be a woman architect then; it's not a big deal any more.'

Still, for all her love of the city – particularly Denys Lasdun's National Theatre and the South Bank ('a wonderful ensemble of cultural buildings on one site'), and Alison and Peter Smithson's condemned 1970s Robin Hood Gardens tower block in Poplar ('a wonderful modernist haunt for me and my students') – she is distressed at the lack of an overarching general building plan. Does she like skyscrapers such as the Shard and the Gherkin? 'I like them,' she says. 'But London is a bit haphazard – there's no one plan for dealing with major sites. If you don't want to demolish green fields, you have to have a modern city and have great density on the ground, and deal with thousands of people emerging on to the street. You've got to have a strategy.' And neither Ken Livingstone nor Boris Johnson have provided the guiding mind that could produce a coherent building scheme for the city.

Hadid is now able to put her theories into practice here. Her first British building, the Maggie's Centre for cancer care in Kirkcaldy, was completed in 2006, all raking roof lines, wrapping banks of windows at increasingly acute angles. The centre, paid for by charitable donations, was hailed as a triumph, not least by Sarah Brown, the then Prime Minister's wife, who is patron of the Maggie's Centres. Gordon Brown, MP for Kirkcaldy, opened the building himself. And almost completed is the Evelyn Grace Academy in Brixton, one of hedge-funder Arki Busson's ARK schools for underprivileged areas. Suddenly, in the lee of a hill lined with Victorian terraced houses, you run slap-bang into a spiky sandwich of steel and concrete, on an irregular Z-plan, arching over a running track and flanked by playing fields with artificial surfaces. In a bid to counter the discipline problems of huge schools, Evelyn Grace is internally divided into four separate schools, each of which has no more than 270 pupils. It's an ingenious piece of geometry, with overhanging triangles of concrete providing shelter from the rain. In the morning, children climb outside staircases and gather on terraces before registration. It means they need never climb an inner stairwell – classic hotspots for violence. A lot of the thinking is derived from American philosophies on how to build harmonious inner-city schools with good discipline.

A downside of success is that Zaha has less time for each building; a project architect will do much of the work, rather than Hadid herself. Has her office become a Hadid factory where she just rubberstamps commissions with her star-chitect signature? 'No, projects go back and forth. Computers give you more flexibility,' she says. 'My early work was very interesting but it has less complexity, it was much more linear; your repertoire is increased.'

Work continues, too, at the London Aquatics Centre on the Olympic site at Stratford. A training pool, diving pool and competition pool are wrapped beneath an undulating leaf-shaped structure, designed to imitate a wave. There have been rumblings that the centre has gone more than £40 million over its £214 million budget. 'The budget was a construction budget,' she counters robustly. 'You've got to add in con-tingencies, inflation, the price rise in steel. It's going very well. The focus of London has been shifting to the East for 15 or 20 years, but the Olympics will completely change East London.'

Gavin Stamp, Private Eye's architecture critic, and an honorary prof-essor at Glasgow University, has attacked Hadid's works for historically costing too much. 'If you're going to commission someone like Zaha Hadid, you should expect to go way over budget,' he says. 'It's all about going for superstar, iconic architects.' Hadid responds to such criticisms with brio: 'My buildings have no bigger margins than anybody else's.'

She comes across as weary but well-equipped for battle whenever there's any criticism in the air. Her sense of authority filters through the whole organisation; her office is run with lavishness and precision, all to cushion the demanding – and sometimes unreliable – ways of the boss. Dealing with Hadid is like dealing with a Hollywood film star. Our appointment is rearranged three times, each one involving a lot of hanging around. Through all the chaos, a series of immaculately polite assistants are on constant call: one provides me with books and images of her works, and a double macchiato; another brings a ribbed glass bottle of water; another some Japanese eats.

When Hadid finally materialises, she is perfectly polite, but there is no question of apologising for all the toing and froing. There is an unspoken understanding that everyone will dance to her tune. 'I finally left because it was too overwhelming,' says one architect, who stopped working for her some time ago and asks not to be named. 'I'm immensely admiring of her, but the work is relentless. She would ring up the office on a Sunday afternoon and expect us to be there. Her standards are exhausting, and she could be absolutely terrifying; not by getting angry, but by setting incredibly high expectations. But that is what's made her. I think she always knew that the tide would turn and the projects would begin to get built. She had no self-doubt.'

There has even been a turning of the tide among some of the nay-sayers. 'I was very critical of her work at one time but now she's become much more original,' says Colin Amery, architectural writer and Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects. 'She's suddenly developed and become eloquent and original. I'm keen on her ski jump [in Innsbruck] and on her BMW factory [in Leipzig]. And her trademark device of the sweeping roofs is really quite refreshing.'

But still not everyone is convinced. Stamp says, 'Naturally one hesitates to be critical for fear of being branded a misogynist and xenophobe, but I cannot take Zaha Hadid seriously as a real architect. Her designs, if superficially attractive on paper, are irrational, rebarbative, pretentious, posturing, impractical and ugly. How typical and predictable that the silly, self-indulgent Stirling Prize should be given to a pointless museum that as yet has no contents and which totally ignores its surroundings. But one expects no more from a merely fashionable international superstar.'

Hadid's course is undiverted by criticism. Her stated aim is to make waves. 'In Britain, it's taken a long time to find out that you can do very radically modern stuff adjacent to very old stuff,' she says. That, in a nutshell, sums it up. Fans of very old stuff never tended to like the radically modern stuff. Fans of radically modern work – the ones who can commission buildings – once didn't like Hadid's stuff; now they do.

The winner of the 2011 Magic of Persia Contemporary Art Prize will be announced at the Royal College of Art in 2011

Zaha Hadid: making waves

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