WOMEN ARCHITECT "Zaha Hadid" Success Story

The designs of Iraqi-born British architect Zaha Hadid (born 1950) are daring and visionary experiments with space and with the relationships of buildings to their urban surroundings.

• After several small projects, including one for the interior of the Moonsoon Restaurant in Sapporo, Japan, Hadid's first major building was constructed in 1993 and 1994: it was a small fire station, with numerous irregular angles (Hadid has been widely quoted as saying that since there are 360 degrees, she sees no reason to restrict herself to just one), on the grounds of the Vitra Furniture Company in Weil am Rhein, Germany. In 1994 Hadid seemed to be on the verge of a breakthrough: her design for the new Cardiff Bay Opera House in Britain's Wales region was selected for construction. It was to be an unorthodox building, with sharp angles and interior spaces that ran into and through one another rather than falling neatly into separate areas, but it was also planned to be inviting to the user, with an auditorium surrounded by glassed-in spaces that gave views of nearby Cardiff Bay.

• With Hadid an unknown quantity and Britain's Prince Charles in the midst of a widely publicized campaign in favor of neo-traditional architecture in Britain, the design ran into trouble almost immediately. The design competition was reopened, and Hadid's design was once again named the winner, but the project's funder, Britain's National Lottery, eventually withdrew its commitment. Hadid was devastated. "It was such a depressing time," she recalled to Rowan Moore of the London Evening Standard . "I didn't look very depressed maybe but it was really dire. I made a conscious decision not to stop, but it could have gone the other way."
• At the same time, Hadid began to amass a solid core of admirers among her staff, among architecture experts, and among ordinary observers. At the same time the Cardiff project was going down in flames, Hadid designed a temporary pavilion to house an exhibit for the architecture magazine Blueprint at a builders' convention. She had to present the structure, described by Moore as "a thing of flying steel," to a gathering of the magazine's advertisers, most of whom greeted it initially with silence. But an executive from a firm that made portable toilets stood up and said "I think it's bloody marvelous" (according to Moore), and began applauding. The other advertisers joined in, and Hadid gained a moment in the building-trade spotlight.    
• As clients became more and more fascinated with Hadid's plans, some of the plans advanced from theory to reality. She designed the unique Bergisel Ski Jump on a mountain near Innsbruck, Austria, and a parking garage and transit station in suburban Strasbourg, France, that later won the Mies van der Rohe Award from the European Union. In 1998 came the biggest commission yet: the Lois and Richard Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati, popularly known as the Contemporary Arts Center.

• The new building had to fit the confines of a narrow street corner lot in downtown Cincinnati, but Hadid made a virtue of necessity by linking the museum's internal and external environments: the outdoor sidewalk continued into the building, where it propelled visitors toward a sleek black central staircase that melded dramatically into the structure's back wall. As viewers ascended the staircase they looked into galleries that completely overturned the usual neutral conception of museum display spaces—the galleries had different shapes and sizes, and each one seemed to present something new to those approaching. "Not many people voluntarily walk up six stories anywhere," noted Joseph Giovannini of Art in America , "but Hadid's space so intrigues visitors that few think of bypassing the experience by hitching a ride on the elevator: they sense they would miss chapters." A bonus in Hadid's design was its economy: the building used only common materials, and construction costs came in at a reasonable $230 per square foot.    
• Hadid's creative fulfillment of a plum commission raised her international profile considerably. Where Hadid had sometimes been considered abrasive and difficult to work with, now she was hailed as a pioneer who had stuck to her vision even while facing difficult obstacles. At times, Hadid ascribed the resistance her ideas encountered to her gender and ethnicity. She also conceded that her work and personality were challenging. "I am eccentric, I admit it," she told Moore, "but I am not a nutcase."    

• Hadid's next major American commission came from Bartlesville, Oklahoma, site of the Price Tower designed by legendary American architect Frank Lloyd Wright. Hadid was hired to design a museum adjoining the Wright building—a choice that made sense, for Hadid was sometimes compared to Wright for her futuristic designs and her visionary rethinking of the relationships between humans and buildings. In 2006 it was one of Wright's most famous structures, the Guggenheim Museum in New York, that played host to a major retrospective of Hadid's work.    
• Indeed, the links between building and environment, and between building and user, loomed larger in Hadid's thinking as her fame grew and commissions poured into her office. "I started out trying to create buildings that would sparkle like isolated jewels; now I want them to connect, to form a new kind of landscape, to flow together with contemporary cities and the lives of their peoples," she told Glancey. A new factory she designed for German automa- ker BMW was laid out in such a way that workers and management personnel crossed paths more frequently.    
• In 2004 Hadid was awarded the Pritzker Architecture Prize, considered the profession's highest honor. She was the first woman to receive the award. In the mid-2000s she finally received a full-scale commission in the British Isles, for a cancer-care building called Maggie's Centre in Fife, Scotland. Highly visible Hadid buildings planned or underway included a bridge in the Persian Gulf state of Abu Dhabi, a movie theater complex in Barcelona, Spain, and several new museums. Greater international exposure seemed assured in a project waiting further down the line: the aquatics building for the 2012 Summer Olympics to be held in London. And she seemed to be outdoing herself with each successive design. "Co-curator Monica Montagut quotes Hadid's statement that 'I still believe in the impossible,'" noted Raymund Ryan in his Architectural Review commentary of Hadid's Guggenheim exhibition. "Judging from this display in New York City, there are few limits to what Hadid might do next."

The Pritzker Prize, and a disdainful press

• Hadid received her career-defining prize, the 2004 Pritzker, at the relatively young age of 53 despite only having a small body of built work. The accompanying headline of the official announcement—”Zaha Hadid Becomes the First Woman to Receive the Pritzker Architecture Prize”—signaled the tenor of the media coverage to follow.
• Never mind the groundbreaking museum she designed in Cincinnati or the wonderfully weird fire station in Weil am Rhein, Germany or confounding design concepts, many profiles of the star architect fixated on her womanliness. A 2004 New Yorker profile introduced Hadid’s work by way of her “remarkably emotive face, which veers from sweetly girlish to volcanically enraged.”
• In a new book Where Are the Women Architects?, historian and architecture professor Despina Stratigakos argues this gendered portrayal of Hadid’s person, and the kinds of questions she was often asked to answer, would have been unthinkable treatments for any of the previous 25 Pritzker laureates.
  

  Clichés like “ball-breaking harridan” and “vertiginous heels,” dot this 2004 article by The Guardian‘s Stuart Jeffries:Zaha Hadid offers a moist, limp hand to shake. She’s coming down with flu. This is a disappointment. Where is the vibrant monster I’d been promised from previous interviews? Where’s the ball-breaking harridan barking abuse in Arabic into her mobile as she wafts into her north-London studio in vertiginous heels, before snarling unpleasant things to her staff in terrifyingly idiomatic Anglo-Saxon?

A role model, but never a mold

While there are many talented, recognized and respected female architects practicing around the world, Hadid was the only one to have so clearly punched a hole in that proverbial glass ceiling. For many rising female architects, losing Hadid is like seeing a beacon in the field extinguished.

“Her loss is devastating,” says Stratigakos, who also heads the architecture department at the University at Buffalo. “You lose heart when you can’t find role models. I worry about how few women architects there are–not just in Pritzker prizes, but in novels, in films… I worry about my students.”

According to a 2014 study by the San Francisco chapter of the American Institute of Architects, one-third of women drop out of the profession citing the lack of role models as a reason. Over 70% of women experience sexual discrimination, harassment or bullying on the job.

But Hadid was a complicated figure, and not exactly the easiest role model. She was notorious for refusing to back down from criticism over her selection of clients or the working conditions of the people who built her designs. And her professional success was tightly intertwined with her force of personality and uniquely groundbreaking ideas—a formula few could hope to replicate.

As Hadid explained to the students in Oxford, she put ideas first—and often before practicality or the wishes of her clients. “I believe in progress, I think if we do enough research, we can push the envelope and get better results… That’s what I like about architecture. It’s exhilarating, but also heart-breaking.”

Two heartaches were the Cardiff Bay Opera House in Wales in 1994 and the ongoing saga of the Tokyo Olympics stadium in Japan. Both were politicized, high-profile commissions that seemed entranced by Hadid’s ideas, then abruptly spurned her for another architect.