She was blamed for all these, unfairly attacked for her personality as well as her competence. Most recently, her competition-winning design for Tokyo’s Olympic stadium was scrapped. Hong Kong was not built neither, 10 years later, was the Cardiff Bay Opera House. But in Hadid’s case it was the start of what became a persistent theme for her critics. It was a failure to launch that is common in most architectural careers, where unbuilt schemes outnumber built projects by a large margin. The eminent engineer Peter Rice, who had worked on the Pompidou Centre in Paris, endorsed them as entirely buildable, but the client turned out not to have the cash. A series of overlapping cantilevers jutted out into space, providing layers of accommodation, bars and restaurants, as well as hotel rooms. The most famous of them were made for the competition she won in 1983 to design a resort complex in Hong Kong, known as The Peak. But these were not abstractions or fantasies: they were the product of Hadid’s exploration of new ways to imagine how space might work, inspired in part by the drawings of the Russian artist Kazimir Malevich, whom she discovered when she was still a student. They were more like Piranesi dreamscapes than rational proposals for orthogonal buildings. They did not depict anything that could be conventionally identified as a building, but instead showed jagged landscapes in which walls and roofs, inside and outside, ground plan and cross section, merged seamlessly one into another. The most visible results of that period are a series of huge paintings that hinted at what she might build if she had the chance. And she wasn’t going to try to ingratiate herself with those who did not understand her. For those who didn’t get it, her work was seen as just too difficult. They conjured up glimpses of a world she had imagined but which did not, as yet, exist. She was working night after night, essentially living in the drawings that flowed from her pen in an apparently unstoppable flood. At a time when most architects were still under the lash of the Prince of Wales, camouflaging their work with a constipated brick and tile skin, or decorating their facades with fragments of postmodern confectionery, Hadid was not building anything. In the London of the early 1980s, when Zaha Hadid, who has died aged 65 after a heart attack, first opened her own office in a small room in a redundant Victorian school in Clerkenwell, the idea that she might one day become one of the world’s most celebrated and successful architects would have seemed far-fetched.
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