The Last Architect?

 

 

‘The First Great Female Architect’, recounts  Jonathan Meades interview with Zaha Hadid for Intelligent Life magazine, summer 2008. In the interview, he not only gives the questions and answers (or for some, lack of an answer) given during the interview but his description and account of the time spent with Zaha Hadid, and his impression of her, and the architecture world she lives in.
The article starts off with a description of her surroundings: her office, and the location of her office in London. In the first paragraph: a description of the employees, all different, but somehow merge into one. In the office everything seems to fuse into one: all becomes Zaha Hadid, there are no other personality but hers that comes out of the description. This is her ‘factory’, making her, who she is.

Then we follow interviewer and interviewee to her apartments, which again a show cases of who she is; the architect, not ‘Zaha the private woman’. Jonathan Meades is here to talk about her as an architect not as a person. Zaha Hadid is probably the most famous female architect alive today. Her name has become a brand, the product of her: what she does and what she designs: from buildings, to fashion, to furniture, etc. Through this text he is trying to understand this recognition, ‘fame’, that has now been associated to Zaha Hadid. He is trying to decide if it is justly given. However for this he also needs to study the architecture surrounding Zaha Hadid: British Architecture today.

From the text Jonathan Meades understands the realities of being an architect today. He doesn’t seem to have great regard for it, saying it has basically become just ‘a very big buisness’. Meades goes on to criticise the ‘low salaries and long hours’ of the business, and the fact that the work of architect in Britain has been undervalued. The consequences are that architects are cut short from doing anything really creative ; ‘British architects who aspire to anything more than polite apartment buildings or self-effacing, production-line offices have to prove themselves abroad’.

When first reading the article, Jonathan Meades seems to be critical of Zaha Hadid as well. When describing her office, her work, how he recounts her answers, it first doesn’t seem to be a positive picture of the architect. Then again, reading into the text, examining it further, you realise that he not only appreciates her and he does think that, as his title describes her, she is ‘the first great female architect’. He commends her for her success as an architect, and a woman architect. One of the other reproaches he does to today’s architecture is still a male dominated world. And Meades congratulates Zaha Hadid for having achieved in such of macho milieu.

Jonathan Meades seems to even agree with Zaha Hadid, on her views on older buildings. As described in the text, Zaha Hadid seems troubled by the number of buildings, which were built in the last 50-60 years and are now being demolished. And rightly so: “buildings used to outlive humans, not least because the process of construction was so long and laborious that permanence was a desirable aim’’. Architecture has become temporal, which Zaha Hadid complains, brings a lack of quality to the architecture.

Zaha Hadid’s work has been commented for being conceptual, futuristic, and just creating what she wants, with disregard to the surroundings. However Jonathan Meades defends her. He agrees with her idea that buildings today shouldn’t just reflect what has already been built. Moreover, defends her work, saying that she does look at the immediate context, and brings it into her design, but through her own process. All her buildings are her but a different, unique part of her, linked with the surroundings, the design becoming her interpretation and response to the site.

Through the text Jonathan Meades appreciates her struggle and commends her for being able to create her own buildings, while uncompromising her ideas.  He describes how Hadid is Zadid Hadid, and not anyone else, how she is unique and how she does not and should not pretend to be anyone else. She is an ‘artist’, ‘’ fighting […] against the architecture of the marketplace, struggling to assert the paramouncy of the artist, ie, of herself, of an uncompromised vision’’.

I am not the biggest fan of Zaha Hadid‘s work. I do like some of her buildings while find others a bit too ambitious. However, I do agree with Jonathan Meades: she is unique, her buildings reflect her style – not similar to anyone else’s work, and you cannot deny the fact that even if you may not like her work, or find certain of her buildings really conceptual, it is her work and she has been able to rise above the general thought to create her own identity.