Zaha hadid obituary

1. Zaha Hadid, 1950-2016 Outside the rectangle
The Iraqi-British architect refused to choose between art and building
The Economist Apr 9th 2016
ZAHA HADID, like her architecture, was striking to look at. Ring-like objects stretched across
her hands like delicate cutlery, and she favoured pleated fabrics, feathers, unusual silhouettes
and complicated footwear. Like the swimming pools with swooping double-curved roofs she
built for the London Olympics, she was instantly recognisable. But like the cancer centre she
designed for Kirkcaldy’s Victoria Hospital, she was reluctant to reveal everything at once: a
spiky exterior protects a sheltering and intimate interior from a bleak setting.
There were times Ms Hadid needed a hard shell. Her design for the Cardiff Bay Opera House
won a competition against 268 entrants, but was torpedoed by a minority that didn’t like it—or
her. The Heidar Aliyev centre she designed for Azerbaijan’s capital was called a monument to a
dictator, a charge not often levelled at male peers in similar political environments. In 2014
the New York Review of Books retracted and apologised for a claim that there had been more
than 1,000 deaths of migrants working on the site of a stadium she was building in Qatar. There
had been no deaths, and construction had not even started. But the story was repeated by the
BBC, so in a radio interview about her winning the Royal Gold Medal for Architecture, she
rebutted the claim, then cut the interview short.
Ms Hadid built one of the world’s most impressive architectural practices. Its professionalism
allowed her to work on a large scale all around the world, from Istanbul to Wolfsburg, Doha to
Cincinnati. In Glasgow her Museum of Transport (pictured) is as striking as a lightning flash on
the banks of the Clyde. Of two huge projects in Beijing, one is a cluster of dune-like
skyscrapers, the other a hollowed out vortex of glass and steel.
Her life was marked by the loss of a secular modern Iraq that might have been: her father was
a prominent politician before the Baathists took power. After studying mathematics at the
American University of Beirut, she studied at the Architectural Association in London in the
1970s, at a time when there was still a huge divide between the art of architecture and the
business of building. That this divide has vanished can partly be attributed to Ms Hadid.
Under the influence of her charismatic teacher, Rem Koolhaas, she discovered the paintings of
Kazimir Malevich, the pioneer of “dynamic suprematism”. She began to draw and paint,
beautifully and compulsively, producing images with little apparent connection to buildings. She
didn’t want to be conventional, but she certainly did want to build. Those drawings presaged
her search for fluid ideas about what architectural spaces could be like. Through sheer force of
will she realised them.
Give or take the Sydney Opera House, architecture was still in the era of the rectangle when
she began. For better or worse, her work, together with that of a few others, notably Frank
Gehry, has given permission for an entire generation to experiment with explosive architectural
forms. In the process, what was once revolutionary has become mainstream. She tackled
office towers and ski jumps and cutlery, all the while trying to make materials do new things
and to create new shapes. And that is what gained her a constituency far beyond the world of
architects.
In pairs:
I From the context, infer the meaning of the words in bold (do not use any dictionary).
II Find all the words/phrases/metaphors used to describe Hadid's work. What are the similarities
with the video we've just viewed?