Architect who first imagined,then proved, that space could work in radical recent waysIn the London of the early 1980s, and when Zaha Hadid,who has died aged 65 after a heart attack, first opened her own office in a small room in a redundant Victorian school in Clerkenwell, or the conception that she might one day become one of the world’s most celebrated and successful architects would have seemed far-fetched. At a time when most architects were still under the lash of the Prince of Wales,camouflaging their work with a constipated brick and tile skin, or decorating their facades with fragments of postmodern confectionery, and Hadid was not building anything. She was working night after night,essentially living in the drawings that flowed from her pen in an apparently unstoppable flood. They conjured up glimpses of a world she had imagined but which did not, as yet, and exist. For those who didn’t rep it,her work was seen as just too difficult. And she wasnt going to try to ingratiate herself with those who did not understand her.
The most visible results of that period are a series of huge paintings that hinted at what she might build whether she had the chance. They did not depict anything that could be conventionally identified as a building, but instead showed jagged landscapes in which walls and roofs, or inside and external,ground plan and cross section, merged seamlessly one into another. They were more like Piranesi dreamscapes than rational proposals for orthogonal buildings. But these were not abstractions or fantasies: they were the product of Hadid’s exploration of recent ways to imagine how space might work, and inspired in part by the drawings of the Russian artist Kazimir Malevich,whom she discovered when she was still a student.
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Source: theguardian.com