Visionary of the Year: Zaha Hadid

Philip Sinden

Ask anyone to name a female architect, probably only one comes to mind: Zaha Hadid. And yet, in a profession in which women are so poorly represented, she's not just its most successful female practitioner; she is, regardless of gender, counted among its ruling elite, right up there with the big boys. In 2004, she became the first woman ever to win the 26th annual Pritzker Architecture Prize (the architects' Oscar); and in October, she walked off with the British RIBA Stirling Prize for her iconic contemporary art museum, Maxxi in Rome, which she accepted clad in an exquisite yellow Prada coat. Not bad for someone whose education began in a convent in Baghdad in the 1950s.

'I know, I think it's amazing,' she says of her extraordinary success, sitting in her glaringly white apartment, just round the corner from her office in Clerkenwell, London, finishing a toasted sandwich skewered through with caperberries on cocktail sticks. 'But, you know, you get hit on the head all the time in this business. You have to deal with daily issues and that humbles you. You don't have time to think how incredible it is.'

Not that Zaha – now so recognised in her field, that she's up there with other single-namers like Jackie (O), Damien (Hirst), or Naomi (Campbell) – is known for her humility, exactly. She is as flamboyant as her buildings, known for their dynamic curves and dramatic swooping silhouettes, and as eye-catching as the iridescent finishes of her sinuous furniture pieces. Outspoken, never knowingly underdressed (a couple of years ago, she developed quite a penchant for American Apparel's electro metallic leggings, but she has since gone back to black), and decidedly diva-esque, her presence can fill a room, as can her put-downs. 'She has a really great sense of humour,' says long-time friend, architect Nigel Coates. 'But if you know her, well… she can be difficult too.' Today she's on fabulous form, and wrapped in a padded silk Issey Miyake jacket, worn upside down, because, she declares, 'I always wear his pieces that way round. They just look better.' Coming from a lesser artist, it would sound absurdly irreverent. But I bet even Miyake is happy for an acknowledged genius like Zaha to reinvent his designs.

Right now, she is on a roll. So much so that a staff of over 400 are beavering away in her nearby studio in a former Victorian school. Between them, they are working on 80 projects that include products and buildings. Twenty big architectural works are currently on site around the world, from a performing-arts centre in Abu Dhabi and a library and conference centre in Azerbaijan to a transport museum in Glasgow that's opening next year and, of course, the Aquatics Centre for the 2012 London Olympics, with its sinuous stingray-inspired roof. There is the set and costume design for an opera in Los Angeles in the offing (she may well collaborate with Vivienne Westwood) and an Opera House in Ganzhjou, China, that was inaugurated in May this year. Maxxi, which took 11 years from conception to completion, was the scene of a grand opening in November 2009, and the empty spaces were filled with contemporary dancers on the opening night; the art only arrived early the next year. Its crazed interior of labyrinthine black metal stairs, twisting corridors, concrete tubes and cavernous halls has been an unbelievable success. The locals, perhaps used to seeing architecture as spectacle (think of the Colosseum), can't stay away.

'The buildings I've made are what I collect,' she says. 'And people. Friendship is important.'  She also has a world-class collection of clothing by Miyake and Yohji Yamamoto ('a brilliant man'), and plenty of Lanvin. If she hadn't been an architect, she says, she would have been a fashion designer. 'Or maybe a shrink.'

Whereas Zaha's reputation and reach are global, her first British building was completed only a month ago, and even more surprisingly it's a school, the Evelyn Grace Academy, in the edgy South London area of Brixton. The whole edifice rises in a swooshing arch over a running track – a fabulously Hadid-type solution to a gritty inner-city issue of a site that's really too small for the needs of 1,200 pupils.

Her own schooling was rather different. Born in 1950 in Baghdad, where her father was an important politician, young Zaha first went, she tells me, 'to a nun's school in Baghdad'. 'Isn't that bizarre? Then to an awful boarding school in Hertfordshire.' She took a degree in maths in Beirut before finding her way to the radical Architectural Association School of Architecture in London (so radical in the mid-1970s that students didn't even touch on how to design buildings), where she regularly attended lectures in a Chantal Thomass coat made entirely of bright pink feathers. 'Talk about camp! It was stunning, though. I went to Moscow in it one time. Imagine me standing in a queue at Lenin's tomb. I don't think the soldiers had seen anything like it.'

Success was far from instant. She didn't build anything until 1993, when she was in her early forties, and that was a fire station in Germany for the visionary furniture company Vitra (although, with all its sharply angled planes and funny triangular spaces, it turned out to not be a very good fire station). She won a competition – twice – to build the Cardiff Bay Opera House in the mid-1990s. But the funding application for her overarchingly avant-garde vision was rejected, and the project was scrapped. (It was later replaced by the Wales Millennium Centre, the design of which the local dignitaries managed to hand over to one of the original competition's runners-up.) 'It was very tough,' she says, sighing. 'Being a woman, then being foreign, and being an Arab.' Then, in the 2000s, Hadid's fluid, hitherto alienating forms began to make sense and see the light of day. Her star has since ascended into orbit.

If Hadid can take some credit for broadening the possibilities for women in her profession, she still can't equate it with family life. 'When I could have had children, it didn't occur to me. And with architecture, if you stop for a bit, I don't know how you go back. Plus, it's great that it's now a global thing – and I have projects all over the world. But I travelled at least once, if not twice a week from May to July. It is my life. You have to be so focused all the time. There is nothing else. It's a very complex job.' Is her office her family? 'It's a family set-up maybe, but it's not the same.'

Her highly curated apartment, as much a gallery as a home, is scattered with her own unusual furniture, devoid of art and knick-knacks, bar a surprising deep-pink raffia basket in the bathroom with dried, dusty pink roses spilling out of it. She says she rarely entertains here, and her home does suggest a single life, and one dedicated to work. It wasn't always like this . 'When I was at the Architectural Association, I was always partying,' she says. 'I did that till the late Eighties. Then I had to start taking things seriously.' Now she likes to dine at Moro, Scott's, Yauatcha and the Wolseley, and regularly lunches at Shoreditch House, 'always late, at 3pm'. She enjoys going to Miami. 'It's very relaxed, it's Latin. It used to be really incredible – I remember staying at the Delano and it was like a scene from a Ricky Martin video – but places change.' And recently, thanks to many trips to see the Maxxi taking shape, she has discovered 'some really nice fashion stores in Rome'. 'One called Gente, and another called Fad or something.'

She never intended to live in London, she says, 'but I came to study and loved it more and more. The English allow you to do what you want. They don't really care. And London is one of the great cities in the world. The only thing it fails in is architecture. But maybe that's fine.' After all, in that respect, Zaha seems to have conquered the world.

This piece was originally published in the December 2010 issue of Harper's Bazaar. 

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