She is a woman in the most masculine of the arts, and an Arab—an Iraqi, no less—with fiery political views of her own and a family history steeped in Iraqi politics. She has never been a natural fit, to put it mildly, with the clubby male establishmentarians who dole out the money to put up major buildings. And yet Zaha Hadid Architects is building them.
Perhaps it was a lucky coincidence that computer-aided design tools came along at precisely the right moment in Hadid’s evolution—around 1990, when her language was fully formed but her projects were widely judged to be unbuildable. Or maybe she was a prophet of what has come to be known as digital architecture. In any case, the computer was only a tool that helped her realize a preëxisting vision; it did not create her aesthetic.
Hadid was born into a wealthy family in Baghdad, in 1950, and she grew up at a time when Iraq’s capital was a secular, cosmopolitan, progressive city, full of new ideas and cultural experiments.
Hadid’s parents remained in the country, but Zaha was sent to boarding schools in England and Switzerland when she was sixteen. Her two brothers, Foulath and Haytham, who were older by twelve and fifteen years, had both gone to Cambridge University, and she spent a lot of time with them in London. “It was the nineteen-sixties, and I was becoming aware of all the new identity issues, and the political changes, and all the dreams of nation-building,” she told me. She would return to Baghdad for holidays. “It was a great place, and I often thought of it. I still do,” she said. But she hasn’t been back since 1980; the house she grew up in is still standing, boarded up.
As part of their work on the Russian avant-garde, Hadid’s unit studied Suprematism, the abstract movement founded by the painter Kazimir Malevich.
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