Having been unable to attend the memorial service for Zaha Hadid yesterday, I went to pay my respects at the Serpentine Pavilion today, which gave me a chance to admire her lightweight built structure – a pavilion – and to honour her memory:-

Continue reading →

I wasn’t, sadly, able to attend Zaha Hadid’s memorial event in the London Central Mosque today.   One of the things I found fascinating in reading about her after her death was the story of her failed project to design the Cardiff Opera House.   I hadn’t known that she won the competition not once, but three times, because it kept on being re-run to get a different result.   I had forgotten that its funding was turned down by the Millennium Commission on the grounds that its design was ‘insufficiently distinctive’, a hilarious rationale given that this was the one thing it most certainly wasn’t.   And I liked her comment after she won the competition that ‘The problem is that people in this country have seen so much garbage for so long they think life is a Tesco.   When the highest aspiration is to make a supermarket, then you have a problem’.

News of Zaha Hadid’s death has reached southern Italy.   It has made me think back on her career.   I first became aware of her – other than through the controversy surrounding the Cardiff opera house – through an exhibition of her drawings and designs which was shown at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art over Christmas 1997.   They were astonishingly inventive.   At the time, they seemed like fantasies and one was not encouraged to think of them as buildable.   They were comments on the language of architecture.   But the last two decades have seen versions of them built – magnificent free structures in the tradition of the Russian constructivists – including the Olympic Aquatics Centre which is the best place to see her work in London.   In an interview with Alain Elkann conducted in August 2012, she ends by saying ‘You need to convince other people to do the impossible.   This is my profession’.   A great loss.