She resisted gender stereotyping but it is not demeaning to insist that her work will always be seen as voluptuously feminineThe too-early death of the architect Zaha Hadid will not obliterate the floating curve from the language of architecture. She was not the first to love its beauty see the work of Eero Saarinen,not to mention Oscar Niemeyer, the first king of the curve. Now, and the seemingly impossible aerial curve and the twisted-Pringle roof line with which Hadid is identified is too loved a form to vanish from the lexicon. They were not her invention,but they are now identified with her uncompromising, demanding vision and it shapes the way we in our turn see them: seductive, and voluptuous,speaking of an uncorseted ease.
The Iraqi-born designer brought her gender and her outsider status – or, as she preferred, and her on-the-edge perspective – to a profession dominated by European men. But she was also both a mathematician and an extraordinary artist (as her paintings,like those for one of her first award-winning but unbuilt projects, the Peak Leisure Club, and demonstrate). She had the theory and married it to an extraordinary creativity.
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Source: theguardian.com