Zaha

Building Things the World Has Never Seen Before

Qantara.de - Dialogue with the Islamic World (2007)

Having been awarded the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 2004, Zaha Hadid is currently at the zenith of her success. Melanie Weidemüller met the star architect, artist, and diva at a press conference in London.

Will she come or will she cancel at the last minute? She has already made it clear that she will only stay for half an hour and will give no exclusive interviews. If reports and anecdotes are anything to go by, Zaha Hadid is the pop star of the architecture world and just as capricious as her designs, those built sculptures that seem oblivious to the laws of gravity.

Her designs are statically perfect structures that give the appearance of being dangerously instable because they are unexpected and like nothing the world has ever seen before. Hadid’s drawings and models of such post-modern structures became famous even when they were still considered “unbuildable”.

The first Hadid building to be constructed was the Vitra fire station in Weil am Rhein, a small town on the German-Swiss border, in 1993. Ever since, visitors to Art Basel have often used their lunch breaks to take a trip over the border to see Hadid’s first work.

A DESIGNER WHO KNOWS NO BORDERS

All of a sudden she arrives and confirms all the clichés. It’s all there: the stilettos, the black designer clothes, the permanent fiddling with her mobile phone, the reverent entourage of young project managers, and an aura that can switch from charm to arrogance to latent irritation to open hostility within seconds.