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Nicholas Fox Weber dares to meet the ferocious genius

behind some of today's most original and extraordinary

works of architecture. Portrait by Irving Penn.

had heard Zaha Hadid was ferocious. Just before the architect's Lois and Richard Rosenthal Center for Con­temporary Art in Cincinnati opened to ovations last year- 1J1e New York Times called it "the most impor­tant American building to be completed since the end of the Cold War"- the crew installing a concwTent ex­hibition of her work were made miserable when Hadid decided things were not going the way she wanted; her behavior, [was told, ranged from little-girl petulance to out-and-out rants. Another Hadid classic came from an interpreter who had recently worked on the archi­tect's negotiations with a group of Japanese business­men hoping to commission several shopping malls.

While !Uing her nails, Haclid had belligerently refi.lsed to make even one suggested design change, causing the normally polite visitors from Tokyo to use a word for her that the interpreter discreetly declined to translate. And then there was the architect in Gc1many who described working for Hadid as a "fo1m of masochism," adding that he had once seen her publicly shout at an assistant architect that be should look at himself in the mirror and only return in an Armani suit. Although Ha-

SHEER INTENSITY did has endless requests to take on new work, sit on juries, Hadid's work, says and give lectures- and is perennially rumored to be the her friend Donna next Pritzker Architecture Prize winner- her cultural Karan, "has a strength and a seduction to it­the way she does."

celebrity has come about not only from the brilliance of her buildings but from the fascinating example she sets as a

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woman whose strong will and acid tongue rival the strength of her creations. At a recent retrospective ofher work in Vietma, where some 2,000 people showed up for the opening, attendants handed out T-shirts emblazoned with one ofher more famous pronouncements: WOULD THEY CALL ME A DIVA lF I WERE A GUY?

From the outset, I expected trouble. Advised that Hadid was unlikely to focus on our conversation in the office, l asked to talk with her staiT and then have lunch with her alone. Her assistant eventually worked out a time when I could visit Hadid's workshojrlike London headquruters, which are housed in a lru·ge Victorian building in Clerkenwell, a disttict of design ftrms and rutists' studios. I would meet at 12:30 with some project archi­tects-Hadid has a staff of 60-and then head for lunch at l :30 with the boss herself.

t the appointed hour, I began with the sub­alterns. But as 2:00P.M. approached Ha­did still had not appeared in what was re­ferred to as the media and press center. I was informed that she was just ru·ound the corner, in a large room where rows of draftsmen were at work, but was not yet

generous-spirited people I ever met. Just as our wide-rangi.J1 and animated conversation led me to a more nuanced under standing of her work, so did the experience of observing th opposite extremes ofHadid's many-sided personality. "Zaha' funny, chruming, and strong," as Donna Kru·ru1 says. "All thes things are mirrored in her work, but if she weren't feisty, she wouldn' t be able to make the kinds of designs she does."

Zaha Hadid's buildings cascade in vibrant rhythms and seem to have been built from the inside out. Distinguished co]. leagues call the 53-year-old dynamo "an utter genius with space"; her sprawling art centers and space-age office build­ings realize in unprecedented form the dream put into twen­tieth-century architecture by Le Cor busier, with his ideal of structures without facades whose life grows from their inner pulse and multiple functions. No two of Hadid's designs are the same; the architect has no trademark "style" or cookie­cutter mold to stamp out matching clones. When people reach for a label to apply to her buildings, they can only falter. She might be compared to Frank Gehry for the sheer daring and originality of the work, but its look is hers alone. If one were to insist on a school to describe Hadid's designs, the most apt might be 3-D Functional Suprematism: Essentially, Hadid has

ready to meet. Fifteen minutes later, now almost an hour behind, I announced that

1 would ftnd her myself and headed dis­obediently into the main office.

Sitting on the edge of a drafting table, Hadid had a mobile phone buried in her lap and could not be bothered to look up from its screen when I tried to introduce myself. Her presence nonetheless was substantial. Because of the way she was bent over the phone, what I fu·st took in were her thick mane of dru·k hair- its reddish-blonde streaks askew-ru1d her bare legs dangling off

Hadid has a reputation for being

able to hold her own and more:

borrowed certain fmms and attitudes from the works of early Russian abstract artists- Malevich and El Lissitzky, in particular-and reapplied them to architecture, as if the paint on the cruwas has been freed to burst into multidimensional life.

Hadid's Vitra Fire Station, located on the grounds of the design compa­ny's complex in Germany, lunges at1d soars with the crisp decisiveness of an amalgam of icicles and glass shards. The nerve center of BMW's new in­dustrial complex, scheduled to open this spring in Leipzig, undulates like the assembly line nearby and invokes

"I never explode in public .... I explode

all the time" the table. She is a large woman, and there was something ar­resting about the way her feet were squeezed into a pair of point­ed, spike-heeled gold pumps (designed, she later told me, by her friend Donna Kru·an). Those audaciously delicate suppo1ts for the mass above reflected the same sort of gravity-defYing bravu­ra she achieves in her buildings. But in general her appearance was so baroque that her total look was as hard to pin down as the elements of her architecture-especially because 1 could not see her face. Still without raising her head, she was shouting to her personal assistant-safely at the other end of the room-"ridicu­lous!" and "Are you stupid?," offering me a rather sweet "sony" before resuming the blasts. The issue, apparently, was coffee. She had asked for a decaf espresso. Others had their Starbucks cups-where was hers? She looked annoyed with everything. Fi­nally, she ordered her P.A. to atTange for her driver to take us to the restaurant she had chosen for our lunch, if indeed we could still get served at nearly 3:00P.M., which she doubted.

As we finally climbed into her car and set off for the Real Greek, a local canteen, I prepru·ed myself for battle. Two hours later, still sitting across from Hadid, 1 had the most stunning surprise yet as the architect suddenly shifted into being one of the most beguiling, good-humored, patient, and truly

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the energy and optimism that have re­placed the languor of that former East German city. The roof of her u·am station in Strasbow-g, like a gigantic geometric som­brero, redefines the idea of cantilever. Her ski jump in Inns­bruck, AustJia, is a mix of rocket launch and roller coaster, sure to make athletes fiy faster. And the art center in Cincinnati re­sembles sound speakers in a concert hall, multifaceted cubic units that project in every direction at once. The building bas justly received accolades as a totally original approach to a com­plex program of exhibition and event spaces. The work jolts you, but in a pleasant, uplifting way. lt wakes you up with the sense that there are always new possibilities and unexpected solutions. Along with an even larger arts center in Rome, now in the process of being designed, this amazing panoply offmms has unrivaled architectural panache.

The beginnings ofHadid's breathtaking inventiveness can be found in her childhood in Iraq. Twenty-tlu·ee years have passed since she was last in Baghdad, where she was born in 1950, but the memories loomlru·ge. Her pru·ents were botl1 from powerful Muslim families. "My father was a real modernist," Hadid says of a time in Iraq when the country's pru·liamentary-style govern­ment was beginning to crumble. " He believed in indusu·y as a way ofliberatinglraq." Having gone to the London School of

BUILDING THE IMPOSSIBLE (continued from page 521) Karan is one of those people. The first time the designer saw something by Ha­did- it was a rippling, sway-backed sofa that provides seating on two opposite sides- she was flabbergasted by its reve­lation of structure and sculptural force. Karan became ecstatic. "I asked, 'Who did this?' It looks so much like me. All her work is my aesthetic, an out-of-the-box kind of thinking. It's sensual. It's strong. It's all about the body. Il has a strength and a seduction to it- the way she does." Karan has H adid's furniture both at home and in her stores. The designer puts Hadid on a pedestal-and not just one made of her own gold shoes: "If I had to name some of my iconic women, she's definitely among the top ten. She's a pow­erful, sexy woman."

For a long time, H adid herself could not see why she had that sort of heroic stature. " Fifteen years ago someone told me that for a lot of young architects I was a role model," she says." I didn' t under­stand it. But now I am beginning to. Ar­chitecture is not an easy profession for women to deal with. It's not easy to stick it out. A lot of people think the route to success is to give up your principles and ideas. They pressure you to compromise and accept mediocrity. If you're not like that, people think you' re difficult." I laughed and said I had heard that she sometimes let loose in public . This prompted the self-contradictory re­sponse: "I never explode in public .. .. I explode all the time." Smiling, she added, " I can behave terribly, but I do it with a sense of humor." o