Can architecture have a gender? A feminine perspective maybe? Especially if it is a Zaha Hadid building? Frozen like a giant wave between the earth and the sky? Immovable but fluid? Like time made visible with its many flowing curves and pauses? The geometry in Hadid’s work demonstrates that the source of creation has no gender. A creative impulse is neither feminine nor masculine. It just is and when sparked, it sets itself on fire and keeps imagining new forms, shapes, dimensions that defy description.
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Hadid is a woman of Iraqi descent standing tall in the world of architecture and her story is like her buildings. Both cannot be summed up in cliches. Very few architects achieve an iconic stature in their lifetime and have a signature style that shouts out their name to the universe. Hadid has checked both these boxes and then some more. She is today known not just for the buildings she has designed but for what those buildings have done with the idea of architecture. Her work is not just about built space but about space and what can be achieved when it is fearlessly played around with.
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Her buildings are not self-effacing and gentle. They are unleashed storms, outrageous in their ability to go beyond standard ideas of what a building can be or should be. Each building celebrates her love for mathematical precision and also the passion for freedom..spatial and spiritual. Her buildings ( case in point is the Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati among many others), have various facets and perspectives and mirror the world of constant reinvention and change.
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Hadid began using digital drawing extensively to create what seems impossible on paper. Gender debates aside, it needs to be said that she became the first woman architect ever to win the Pritzker Prize for Architecture in its 26 year history and her citation summed it all up. “The architectural career of Zaha Hadid has not been traditional or easy. Her path to worldwide recognition has been a heroic struggle as she inexorably rose to the highest ranks of the profession. Clients, journalists, fellow professionals are mesmerized by her dynamic forms and strategies for achieving a truly distinctive approach to architecture and its settings. Each new project is more audacious than the last and the sources of her originality seem endless.The full dimensions of Ms. Hadid’s prodigious artistic outpouring of work is apparent not only in architecture, but in exhibition designs, stage sets, furniture, paintings, and drawings.”
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Natural forms inspire her, as does modern life in all its dimensions. This rise to the peak of her profession has come from an ability to block obvious drawbacks and to be a clutter-breaker. She came from Iraq. She was a woman and she wanted to build world-class buildings. A brief that would have intimidated lesser talents but not her. Her unapologetic ability to stand by her designs and voice her opinions has cost her a lot and given her many names but as she once asked via a T-shirt ,“Would they call me a diva if I were a guy?” She was once famously described as a , “planet in her own orbit.” That is why her buildings do not seem just rooted but suspended between ether and earth. Her work has the detailing of Baroque and the unpredictable nature of modernism where space shifts, flies, flows and dances .
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And this journey began with her birth in Baghdad, Iraq in 1950. She studied mathematics at the American University in Beirut and moved to London in 1972 to study architecture at the Architectural Association. She graduated in 1977 and became an independent practitioner in 1980. Almost one thousand projects later, the globe as we know it is stamped with her creative energy.
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She may be referred to as a deconstructionist exponent of architecture where formlessness is form but with her life and her work, Hadid has constructed a building idiom that connects her Islamic roots with the rest of the world, that transcends every stereotype about gender and descent and makes the world a place where she and her buildings feel at home and at peace.
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Reema Moudgil has been writing for magazines and newspapers on art, cinema, issues, architecture and more since 1994, is a mother, an RJ , an artist. She runs Unboxed Writers from a rickety computer , edited Chicken Soup for The Indian Woman’s soul, authored Perfect Eight and earns a lot of joy through her various roles and hopes that some day working for passion will pay in more ways than just one. And that one day she will finally be able to build a dream house, travel around the world and look back and say, “It was all worth it.”