Zaha Hadid, Her Architecture, and the World We Live In

A woman who spent her life fighting to be recognized, in a trade that fuses humanity's most complicated ambitions with its most basic needs.

Zaha Hadid was already in her thirties when she started out as an architect, and until she was 41 she had never really built anything. What she had was a vast store of exquisite drawings.

On March 31, 2016, Zaha died of a sudden heart attack at a hospital in Miami. She was 65.

Zaha spent her life desperate to prove herself. Not only because she was a woman and of Arab descent, and not for any lack of confidence — in fact she was fiercely tough and independent, and without that she could hardly have lasted another day in the position she held. She was controversial precisely because of what she believed in: architecture that chased "fusion," built by methods unlike anyone else's. If an architect's work is uncertain and difficult by nature, Zaha's career can only be called exceptionally hard.

In 2004, Zaha Hadid became the first woman architect in history to win the Pritzker Prize. Rem Koolhaas — her teacher and friend, and the 2000 laureate — once asked her: "How do you see your standing in the architecture world right now? Does the prize mean a greater achievement to you, or greater pressure?"

"For many years I fought to win people's recognition. From this moment on, people have truly accepted me — they know I'm a woman who can deliver," Hadid answered.

An architect, unlike an artist, a philosopher, or a writer, depends entirely on other people — rich people, very rich people, because building costs a great deal of money, even a small building. That is why a sensational but accurate line from the architect Philip Johnson gets quoted so often: all architects are whores.

And yet no one doubts what architects mean to this world.

Architecture gives people space to shelter from wind and rain and to settle into a stable life; the ancient Roman architect Vitruvius said the trade should also provide convenience and delight. Star buildings are another matter. They vastly enlarge what a space means to a society, and their existence alone becomes a huge subject of talk. People argue over their shape, their artistic meaning, their effect on the surroundings; in an age when information travels over the internet, someone who has never set foot in a building can still judge whether it is beautiful or ugly, and even imagine what it feels like to stand inside.

In today's social context, architecture is a super-hybrid: public commentary, the workings of capital, symbols of power, and the architect's own ability, all fused together.

But go back to the Zaha Hadid of the early 1980s, and all she wanted was one project she could actually get built.

She had just opened her own practice and entered an international architectural design competition in Hong Kong. Her entry, The Peak Club — a series of huge, abstract granite geometries — won first prize, then never got past the design stage, derailed by the Asian financial crisis.

In fact she won that prize only because one of the judges, the Japanese architect Arata Isozaki, had the eye for it: "I was drawn to her singular expression and the clarity of her philosophy," he said. Otherwise the scheme would have been cut in the first round for its outlandish shapes. The same thing happened in 1994 at the competition for the Cardiff Bay Opera House in Wales: she took first prize, and the project was never realized after the local Cardiff government objected. In an interview on Yang Lan One on One, she called that episode "a major setback in my career."

British society, where Zaha was based, leans conservative, one reason she looked for a breakthrough in other markets. In 1993 she took the first commission of her life: a fire station on the Vitra campus in Weil am Rhein, Germany. The concrete volumes, traced out by tilted, interlocking lines, were judged illogical and needlessly complicated at the time. Today they are a classic of the Vitra campus.

The project is seen as the work that pulled Zaha out of her slump: it shocked the architecture world and brought her great renown. But in the most practical terms, her second well-known building after it was the 1999 Landesgartenschau exhibition hall in Weil am Rhein, on the Rhine, then the Bergisel Ski Jump designed for Innsbruck, Austria in 2002, and the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati in 2003. Six more years passed before the globally celebrated MAXXI, the National Museum of 21st Century Arts in Rome.

Look down the timeline of Zaha's completed buildings — count the drawings and the list has no end — and the star buildings are many, but the gaps between them are long. That leaves out the concept designs that could never be built at all.

An architect at the firm of Thom Mayne, another Pritzker laureate, once explained the architecture business's "way of surviving" to QDaily: firms enter competitions not for the reputation but out of quite practical calculation. Win, and you get the project commission. Lose, and the client still pays a basic design fee, a reliable source of income that keeps an office running day to day.

When we talk about Zaha Hadid, we are talking not only about the star architect but about the practice under her name: 400 employees, and 950 projects across architecture, interiors, and product design still in motion. Zaha could not possibly do it all herself. She could only use her ideas about architecture, and her method, to hold the whole business up.

The name Zaha Hadid comes attached to what is called parametric design. She was long known for "opposing the right angle," for chasing fusion and flow in architectural space. What let her realize that style, besides craft and imagination, was CAD software, which computers made possible. The first produced drawings full of artistry; the second delivered precise calculation. More exactly, it freed architects from a whole chain of work such as calculating load-bearing parameters.

CAD, or computer-aided design, can show on a screen the object an engineer wants to design, or the building an architect wants to design. The technology's founder was Ivan Sutherland, an engineer at MIT, who in 1963 worked out the principle by which users and computers interact through graphics. Without the marvel of CAD, the modern material world could not exist. It lets people revise the models of everything from a screwdriver to a car on the spot, specify each parameter precisely, and monitor the actual production process.

Nicholas Carr, in his book The Glass Cage, once raised a criticism of CAD: before CAD, an architect's artistic source was drawing. A freehand sketch resembles a computer rendering in that both plainly serve to communicate. But drawing is not just a way of expressing an idea; it is a way of thinking. The modernist architect Richard MacCormac put it this way: "I cannot imagine what I would have left, apart from drawing. I use drawing as a process of criticism and discovery."

Zaha said much the same, and her partners admired how unusually clean and decisive the lines under her pen were. Many people who work through CAD are using it not to create but to cover up problems or get around them. How something "ought to be done" and whether "doing it that way works" have no necessary link, but to solve a problem in a context like architecture you must hold both. A drawing made by a human hand can. CAD cannot.

Parametric design, which grew out of CAD, was never unique to Zaha's office. When Frank Gehry designed the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Spain, he already used software normally meant for aerodynamic analysis, and that is what made parametric software famous.

Even now, many schools of architecture treat it as nothing more than a tool. Zaha's office was a real testing ground: it used the technology at scale, and it also preached the technology's advantages and power. She began practicing this technology-backed way of designing with the Phaeno Science Centre in Wolfsburg, completed in 2005; because the job needed more complicated software support, the firm also built a special partnership with the technology center in Wolfsburg.

After that — including Zaha's first completed project in China, the Guangzhou Opera House, as well as Galaxy SOHO, the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion, the Heydar Aliyev Center in Azerbaijan, the Dongdaemun Design Plaza in Seoul, and the Nanjing International Youth Cultural Centre — Zaha applied parametric techniques to nearly all of her designs. But as we said earlier, Zaha's designs were not the output of software; they were real creativity and real control.

Architecture has a side that concentrates power, because however a design presents itself, the end result is always the setting of some kind of rule.

Zaha wanted to build houses as works of art. That is certainly one kind of ambition, but not every ambition takes artistry as its final aim.

What is interesting is that no matter how Zaha read her own work, outsiders — her own clients included — read it strictly through their own eyes. Take the Guangzhou Opera House: Zaha called it "a pebble washed smooth by water," while outside, the frenzy was all about the cultural landmark. As the graphic designer Liu Zhizhi put it: "Because Zaha Hadid came along, the newly rich class finally found a style of building new enough, odd enough, strange enough to show that they really do understand what the future, what the contemporary, means…"

From groundbreaking to completion, the main dispute over the Guangzhou Opera House was its cost: it was called a money-burning vanity project. According to a 2009 report by Southcn.com, the building was designed and planned in 2004, meant to become one of Guangzhou's seven landmark buildings. At the planning stage the total construction cost, land excluded, was put at about 850 million yuan; by 2009, total investment had grown to 1.38 billion yuan. In those same years, China's big cities all seemed caught in a fever for lavish "cultural landmarks" built on huge budgets. By Southcn.com's figures, Beijing's National Centre for the Performing Arts cost 2.6 billion yuan, the Chongqing Grand Theatre 1.5 billion, and the Shanghai Oriental Art Center 1.14 billion.

That also explains why so many of Zaha's important and large projects in recent years sat in developing markets — China, Brazil, Mexico, Azerbaijan, Cambodia, the Middle East. Partly this is because the architecture markets of Europe and the United States had grown saturated, especially after the financial crisis slowed or stalled their economies. Partly, too, rising developing countries needed a designer like Zaha to show their presence and claim a voice.

Just as the Guggenheim Museum, designed by the American architect Frank Gehry, could wake up a small Spanish city called Bilbao, star buildings are counted by many local governments as part of their record in office. Commercial buildings, by comparison, are more conservative. SOHO China, which worked with Zaha Hadid a great deal, is the exception. Its founder and chairman, Pan Shiyi, told QDaily in an interview that it was SOHO that gave Zaha a wider stage: chances to design buildings of greater scale, and more support in construction.

"She said Zhang Xin was one of her best friends," Pan Shiyi said.

China today is beyond doubt one of the world's favorite testing grounds for architects. In 2011 and 2012 alone, China used more cement than the United States used in the entire 20th century. The Chinese government pushed local building booms along starting in 2009; by 2011, spending on fixed-asset investment came to nearly 70% of GDP. Even at the peak of Japan's 1980s building boom, that figure was only 35%, and in the United States it has hovered around 20% for decades. People are startled both by the visual force of the star buildings and by the bubble blown up by all the blinder construction.

Still, star buildings really can produce civic pride. Edward Uhlir once gave an interesting example: ride a Chicago taxi back then and the driver would tell you this idiotic building had wasted a pile of taxpayers' money. He would say he would rather the government built one more hospital or school. All of that grumbling vanished the night the park opened. Two days after it opened, the cabbies were asking their passengers, "You haven't been to Millennium Park yet? It's fantastic."

Every building can create some of the same confusion, Zaha Hadid's included.

Image credits: ArchDaily, Zaha Hadid Architects' official website