11/29/2023 0 Comments Pat jones 3d realms twitterIt is not however her first building in the capital. The latter is to the Baku building as a waterdrop is to a whale, but significant because it is in the heart of London, a place that, although it has been her base for 40 years, has been slow to build her works. The Serpentine Sackler is opening in Kensington Gardens, a conversion and extension of an 1805 gunpowder store that will be a sister gallery to the nearby Serpentine. In Baku, Azerbaijan, there is the colossal Heydar Aliyev cultural centre, a billowing creation that promises to be the most complete realisation yet of the Hadid universe. This autumn two of her more important projects are opening, at opposite ends of the constructional scale. Hadid's first building was a fire station near the German-Swiss border, for the furniture company Vitra, a building that celebrated its 20th birthday this summer. Zaha Hadid's Heydar Aliyev Museum in Baku. Their work includes colossal developments in Changsha, China, and in Bratislava, a large luxury villa in Moscow and a role advising on the airport that Boris Johnson would like to build in the Thames Estuary. Now, her office boasts 400 staff and 950 projects in 44 countries. ![]() Here, although she twice won the commission to design the city's opera house, local politicians did everything they could to ensure they got a mediocre project by another practice. At the turn of the millennium she was still best known for winning at an early age the competition to design the Peak in Hong Kong, a leisure complex that was never realised, and for her martyrdom in Cardiff. Over the past decade or so Hadid has gone from being the Architect Who Never Got Anything Built to someone who can't stop building. If you survive all this, I will make something fantastic, and you could be part of it, is roughly how it goes, and people's view of her will depend on which part of the deal they experience most. She tests everyone – her staff, her clients, the users of her buildings, and herself – and offers an unspoken deal. The truth is that she is all these things, and more. ![]() To others she's a genius, and a hero, the only ground common to all these views being a remark once made by her mentor, Rem Koolhaas, that she is "a planet in her own inimitable orbit". To some, including several fellow architects that I spoke to, she is a tyrant her work is "unbelievably arrogant" and "oppressive I don't believe she cares what it's like actually to be in one of her buildings". To say she divides opinion is to put it mildly. And then the ultimate victory aided by fame, a fame earned through personality and talent. There are hundreds of stories like this about Hadid and they tell the same story, which is also that of her life: the testing of boundaries, the determination to get her way, the fury, the indifference to practical constraints, the opposition of conventional society, here represented by the cabin crew. Then the impossible became possible, and the architect got to change planes. The cabin staff tried to calm her, warn her, admonish her, until a stewardess noticed that this was the same woman whose picture was in the current edition of the in-flight magazine, attached to a profile of the Pet Shop Boys, for whom she had designed a set. Her wish was impossible – to return to the stand, to unload and reload her baggage in the hold, it couldn't be done – but Hadid insisted, vigorously. ![]() ![]() She refused to believe the reassurances that the delay would be brief, and demanded that she be put on another flight. Her plane taxied from its stand, developed a minor fault, and stopped. Zaha Hadid was flying to Frankfurt to give a talk, in which I was her interlocutor.
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