Ten years after her death, the architect’s former London headquarters is opening to the public as a centre dedicated to her work and influence. A critic who commissioned her twice reflects on her extraordinary talent, uncompromising vision and the obstacles she faced in bringing her designs to life.
Inside a building on the Thames, once home to the Design Museum and previously used as a banana warehouse, an extensive archive preserves the remarkable creative legacy of Zaha Hadid and her architectural practice. It includes architectural models resembling pieces of furniture, furniture designs that look like buildings, drawings and large, semi-abstract paintings of projects that helped establish her reputation long before many of her designs were constructed.
The collection also offers a glimpse into her personal world, from her distinctive clothes and striking shoes to her favourite books and films, including crime novels by former jockey Dick Francis and the Richard Gere film American Gigolo.
Hadid, who died aged 65 in 2016, rarely separated art from life. She was as striking a presence as the buildings she created. Fellow architect Rem Koolhaas once described her as “a planet in her own inimitable orbit”.
Her international reputation began to take shape at the age of 32, when she won a competition to design a vast leisure complex in the hills above Hong Kong. The project was never built, but it established her as a major new voice in architecture. Perhaps the fullest expression of her vision came with the Heydar Aliyev Centre in Baku, Azerbaijan, completed four years before her death.
Her architecture evolved from sharp angles and seemingly weightless planes towards sweeping, fluid curves. Across these different phases, a sense of movement and lightness remained central to her work. Yet her completed buildings were also defined by their physical presence and structural ambition. Hadid frequently acknowledged the contribution of British engineering firms, whose expertise helped turn her complex ideas into built reality.
In her later years, she and her practice increasingly relied on digital technology to develop and construct intricate architectural forms. But the foundations of this approach were already visible in her earlier work, much of which was created by hand. Her paintings, painstakingly produced with the help of assistants, anticipated architectural possibilities that technology would only later make achievable. In Hadid’s case, imagination consistently ran ahead of the available tools.
A new home for her legacy
The tenth anniversary of her death is being marked with exhibitions, discussions and other events. The Zaha Hadid Foundation, responsible for preserving her archive and legacy, is opening a new centre in the former Victorian school building in Clerkenwell, London, which once housed her office.
The venue will include exhibition areas, event spaces and facilities for educational programmes. Selected pieces from the foundation’s riverside archive will also go on display.
The celebrations are taking place around Hadid’s birthday on 31 October rather than the anniversary of her death on 31 March. They come at a challenging time for the foundation. A lengthy legal dispute with the successor to Hadid’s architectural practice, now known as ZHA, recently ended with the Court of Appeal ruling in favour of the firm over payments previously made for the use of her name. The decision has brought a major source of income for the foundation to an end.
From unbuilt visions to architectural landmarks
My own encounters with Hadid and her practice go back to a time when the office’s technology consisted of two Amstrad word processors. She had already produced a series of striking but unrealised proposals in Berlin and Tokyo. Some within the architectural profession regarded her work as visually impressive but impractical, arguing that its extraordinary drawings were disconnected from the realities of construction.
That perception began to change in 1994, when she won a competition to design a new opera house in Cardiff Bay for the Welsh National Opera. To me, this was a genuine architectural proposition: a three-dimensional vision of how performance, audiences and the surrounding city could interact.
Not everyone in the Welsh capital agreed. Some influential figures appeared to favour the more established Norman Foster, and obstacles soon emerged. Hadid was required to enter a second competition, which she won again. Rhodri Morgan, then an MP and later first minister of Wales, even suggested that her design could provoke a fatwa similar to the one issued against Salman Rushdie, arguing that its perceived resemblance to the Kaaba in Mecca might be considered offensive.
Ultimately, the Millennium Commission refused to fund the project. A different design by another architectural team was eventually built as the Wales Millennium Centre.
The episode reinforced Hadid’s reputation as the world’s most famous architect whose buildings existed only on paper. But that description was already becoming outdated. A series of major projects soon followed, including museums in Cincinnati and Wolfsburg, a BMW production and office complex in Leipzig, and a ski jump in Innsbruck.
I had the unusual experience of commissioning Hadid twice. The first project was a temporary pavilion for Blueprint, the magazine I was editing, at a construction industry trade fair in Birmingham. It became her first structure to be built in Britain, albeit temporarily. The second was a proposed new building for the Architecture Foundation, where I was then director. That project ultimately collapsed, partly because of cost and funding difficulties.
Working with her at close quarters revealed both her extraordinary strengths and her limitations. She possessed an exceptional imagination, immense talent and the courage to pursue ideas that challenged established conventions. Her influence changed the direction of architecture. As an Arab woman, she also faced barriers that many of her white male contemporaries were unlikely to encounter. Her privileged upbringing offered certain advantages, but it did not erase the difficulties of living in exile from her native Iraq.
The uncompromising side of Zaha Hadid
Hadid could be demanding and intimidating with her staff. She expressed frustration in a deep growl, teased colleagues and occasionally mocked them. During the Venice Architecture Biennale, when she could not find the shoes she wanted for an event, her long-suffering assistant was sent on a flight to London and back to retrieve them.
Yet she also inspired remarkable loyalty, with many colleagues remaining in her practice for years. Her niece Rana Hadid, a trustee of the foundation, remembers her aunt as “a surrogate parent, an older sister, a friend”. She recalls someone who brought “music and dance and colour” into people’s lives and made family and friends feel protected and loved.
Her uncompromising approach extended to the practical demands of architecture. Budget, construction constraints and sustainability were not always at the forefront of her thinking. When developing the Architecture Foundation project, she twice insisted that the building should be made entirely of exposed solid concrete, inside and out. The project architect had to explain that modern insulation standards made this impossible.
The projected cost of cleaning the building’s windows was another concern, potentially equivalent to the salary of at least one employee at the relatively small organisation.
In this respect, Hadid belonged to a tradition of architects who expected their ambitions to be matched by substantial financial resources. Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright and the great architects of the Italian Renaissance similarly pursued visions that required wealthy patrons. For Hadid, as for those predecessors, the scale of the ambition often demanded deep pockets — whether those of Renaissance popes and doges or, in more recent times, oligarchs and oil-rich states.
Preserving an extraordinary body of work
The transformation of the former school into the foundation’s new centre, designed by the emerging practice Studio KA, offers an opportunity to explore both Hadid’s professional achievements and her personal life.
The opening exhibition will focus on her work for performance, including stage designs for the Pet Shop Boys and a 2014 production of Mozart’s Così fan tutte at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. The programme will also feature a video installation by poet and multidisciplinary artist LionHeart.
Hadid wanted the foundation to support younger generations of architects, and the new centre will include studio space for emerging practices.
Although the building is not quite finished, foundation director Aric Chen and his team appear to have made a promising start. Yet the centre does not quite match the scale or impact of the figure it celebrates, nor does it yet do justice to the vast amount of material available.
There is encouraging talk of a major touring exhibition. The remarkable collection stored beside the Thames, still largely inaccessible to the public, deserves a much wider audience. Hadid’s legacy is too significant to remain behind closed doors.
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