It's not time for a Zaha Hadid backlash

Rowan Moore
17 Nov 2009

Zaha Hadid is meeting the Pope this week - apparently he wants to revitalise religious art and architecture - and it will be one of the stranger celebrity encounters.

On one hand there will be the holy bachelor from Germany, on the other the atheist from an Iraqi Muslim background and self-proclaimed "expert at winding people up".

At least "I'll be going back to my origins," she says. "I went to a Catholic school."

It's all in a month's work for Hadid. This November has also seen her unveil the MAXXI, a new national museum of contemporary art in Rome. Closer to home, the undulating roof structure of her Olympic Aquatics Centre has finally been lifted into place.

Currently, it seems as if papal meetings are the level she is at. Over the past decade she has attained such a level of global celebrity that it's hard to know who will be more in awe, her or the Pope.

But it is also a crucial time for Hadid as the adulation she has received in recent years produces a predictable reaction.

A few years ago, if you Googled the word "architecture", Zaha was the first entry that came up.

She was the personification of her art form, equally spectacular in her designs, her appearance and her personality, prized by clients for her ability to bring glamour and excitement.

The reason she is doing the Aquatics Centre, despite the many tribulations the project has suffered, is that the London 2012 bid needed to prove that it was not boring.

Yet despite the gushing praise she has received, she has also had a reputation as an architect whose designs are extravagant and hard to achieve - the Aquatics Centre's budget, for example, went from £73million to a reported £244million.

Her rise was so closely linked to the economic good times that her work risks looking like a luxury now.

There was certainly still plenty of devotion about in Rome last week, where the Italian press swamped her at the MAXXI unveiling.

But I also met an English critic who called the museum "relentlessly hideous". He thought it was too much about architectural spectacle, too little about making a setting for art.

There are other signs of reaction. In autumn 2008, just after the fall of Lehman Brothers, the New York Times described her Chanel Pavilion in Central Park as "delusional" and "a black hole of bad art".

An expensive folly to promote handbags, argued the newspaper, was just what the world didn't need.

Hadid doesn't press all the buttons many people are now hoping to be pressed. She is palpably uninterested in sustainability.

When a Roman reporter lobbed her a predictable question on the subject, her normal fluency stumbled. She said something about light, then "I don't know much about it," then, gnomically, "I think you have to be much more imaginative in terms of the diagram."

She is robust about the continuing importance of work like hers: bold, assertive, modern public buildings. "In this moment it's even more important to invest in public buildings," she says.

"The answer cannot be overwhelming banality everywhere." She is not talking about scaling back her ambitions - if she has a worry about the Aquatics Centre, it is that it "looks small" in the vast Olympic landscape.

She also denies claims that her office has had to shrink. People need spectacle, is her argument. She compares her forceful architecture to landscape, which "is OK if it's overwhelming. People relax more when they go to see incredible mountains and forests and waterfalls."

She points to the effect of the wrapping of Berlin's Reichstag by the artist Christo, nearly 20 years ago. "Critics said that nobody wants that stuff," she claims, but "it was mobbed. People were dancing in front of it. It's just the same as going to a great opera."

People, she says "want to belong to a much more advanced world. There are those who say that people in central Egypt should still live in mud huts. These huts might be very nice but they don't want them. They want baths and electricity."

The MAXXI, although it is located in a quiet zone north of Rome's centre, is certainly operatic. It is a writhing assemblage of sinuous shapes with a big, black, many-branched stair rising through its entrance hall.

It is a celebration of movement, a place for circulating and watching others circulate. It is a symbol of the "advanced world" Hadid talks about, using shapes that, being unlike any from architectural history, presumably come from the future.

"It's very important that historic cities are allowed to reinvent their future," she says.

Part of MAXXI's job is to send a message that history in Rome is still going on. In the city of Bernini and the Pantheon, it was decided that a lot of architectural decibels would be needed to make itself heard.

MAXXI doesn't have any art installed yet and will not open to the public until next spring. A critical test - whether art looks good in it - will have to wait until then.

"The interesting thing about architecture is that it's always difficult," says Hadid.

"That's good for the architecture but not good for your sleep or your health." Certainly her projects often come with tales of conflicts and crises attached.

The Aquatics Centre's budget now costs very much more than a swimming pool of this size normally would, although many reasons, including a changing brief and the inclusion in the project of a large public bridge, are given for this escalation.

MAXXI has been more than 10 years in the making, as it worked its way through what Hadid calls the "cinematic" processes of Italian governmental bureaucracy.

Many of these factors are beyond an architect's control, but it still might be hoped that Zaha develops her architecture such that it is less difficult to achieve, for herself and her clients.

It should be possible to create beautiful buildings without quite so many blood sacrifices.

But the evidence of MAXXI is not that Hadid's approach has suddenly become as out of date or pointless as an HBOS share.

Watching people promenade and swarm about the museum's surfaces is to witness pleasure in using space that is independent of the Dow Jones index. And the New York Times critic who panned the Chanel pavilion loves MAXXI.

As for the Aquatics Centre, it won't have the Baroque elaboration of the art museum, but it will do its job of being 2012's most potent architectural landmark.

It's not surprising really: Hadid was a talented architect before the hoopla of the bubble, and she is still one now.