The star architect Zaha Hadid died in
Miami on Thursday, at the age of sixty-
five.
PHOTOGRAPH BY PETER MARLOW /
MAGNUM
have never known anyone whose
reputation provoked more terror yet
whose actual presence was more fun
than Dame Zaha Hadid’s. There have
always been difficult personalities in
architecture. The profession itself
seems calculated to make one
egotistical and intractable. But it
always amazed me that Hadid had
somehow attracted a singular
reputation for being difficult to deal
with. Compared with other prominent
architects, no one was more down to
earth, more exuberantly real, than
her.
On the occasions that we spent
together when I was working on my
2009 Profile and then, more recently,
at a 2015 New Yorker Festival event, I
was struck anew by the warmth and
humanity that this supposed harridan
radiated. The scary starchitect of
popular imagination was just that, a
fiction. Why was it necessary? Why
did every second article attach “diva”
to her name? Isn’t every architect a
diva?
Truly, it was because Hadid was a
woman who had dared to enter a
man’s world, and took no shit from
anybody, though plenty was offered.
She had to be twice as smart and three
times as tough as her male
counterparts in order to get anything
built. And even then she struggled for
years to realize her projects, and was
forced to endure cruel and humiliating
referendums on such thwarted projects
as the Cardiff Bay Opera House, or the
ongoing Olympic-stadium debacle in
Tokyo, in which the government
blocked Hadid’s competition-winning
design from going forward after
protests from prominent Japanese
architects.
In later years, developing cities were
eager to offer her prize commissions,
but in the U.K., her adopted country,
she was never fully embraced. In the
U.S., as well, her work is scarce, and
while New Yorkers can at least be
thankful that one Hadid work will be
completed—her eleven-story luxury
condo building, on West Twenty-
eighth Street—this morning’s sad news
leaves one filled with regret that this
city didn’t embrace her genius sooner.
Perhaps it is fitting that the only city
in the Western Hemisphere to
commission a Hadid skyscraper,
Miami, was the place where she died
of a heart attack this morning. The
building will stand as her monument.


http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/postscript-zaha-hadid-1950-2016?mbid=nl_160331_Daily&CNDID=30117283&spMailingID=8733455&spUserID=MTA5MjQwNjg3MzEyS0&spJobID=883536733&spReportId=ODgzNTM2NzMzS0

More of her designs