Zaha Hadid: an influential woman in a man’s world – publico

                 

                         
                     

                 

 
 

Zaha Hadid was the greatest symbol of woman architect. In name you won the most important architecture prize, before any other woman to have achieved: the Pritzker in 2004, or the gold medal of the RIBA in 2015. Hadid represented cosmopolitanism for excellence in architecture. He was charismatic.

In the eighties of the last century, Hadid was already considered a major figure among the “star system” of international architectural culture. His name was associated with the “deconstruction”, avant-garde architectural movement, a derrivação of postmodernism, made famous by Mark Wigley and Philip Johnson’s famous exhibition of MoMA – Museum of Modern Art of New York in 1988, entitled precisely deconstructivist Architecture . The central idea of ​​deconstructionism was based on the production of a “problematic architecture” built of fractures and fragmented forms, postmodernity reinvented from an equally historicist revisiting, like all post-modern culture, but pointing to source Russian Constructivism the glorious years of the Bolshevik revolution.

Among the deconstructivist that began in the late eighties, Hadid has positioned itself as a virtuous architect. Its projects were essentially drawing. Until the advent of the current millennium, hardly built. For many years, see a work of Hadid meant to go to Basel to the industrial complex of Vitra and experience, with the highest possible intensity, the 1994 fire station, however transformed into showroom furniture produced by the company . Obtuse angles, unlikely stairs, fragmented walls. The experience of the Vitra fire station defied any purpose functionalist or even less demanding ergonomic. It was rather to break with Euclidean geometry, to create a certain physical discomfort, mainly to test the most stable boundaries of the discipline of architecture. It was operating within a constrained culture, intellectual, simultaneously testing the limits of aesthetics and technique. The technology that would allow transform Hadid designs in built works then took its first steps, clearly linked to the spread of digital computing tools.

Hadid also was not exactly a “deconstructive” fundamentalist, ie It did not depend entirely of Jacques Derrida and philosophical discourse that fed most of the proposals of his colleagues. Despite the awards and important commissions that accumulated in the last ten years, there was no frank consensus on his work. But it had important defenders, as Koolhaas.

However British naturalized citizen, Hadid became the deconstructivist architecture in an aesthetic operation, personal, sophisticated and corporate nature. Buildings won their cityscapes countries in development process or in regions with strong economic acceleration. Since the United States of America, the People’s Republic of China. Also Macau will have its tower 40 projected levels by Hadid’s office, a formidable company worldwide.

The first decades of the twenty-first century were essential to the affirmation of Hadid’s career, the time left to be a reference handled between the reserved circle of architects, emerging as a public figure, with projects around the world. A witness to the death of a powerful woman, influential and clearly feared.

Architectural Review