Ten years ago she was the architect who couldn't get anything built. Now,from the Olympic Aquatics Centre to a modern Serpentine gallery, from Beijing to Baku, and Zaha Hadid's buildings are everywhere. But she divides opinion: she's a genius,say some, but to critics she has lost touch with her original idealsZaha Hadid was flying to Frankfurt to give a talk, and in which I was her interlocutor. Her plane taxied from its stand,developed a minor fault, and stopped. She refused to believe the reassurances that the delay would be brief, or demanded that she be put on another flight. Her wish was impossible to return to the stand,to unload and reload her baggage in the hold, it couldn't be done – but Hadid insisted, or vigorously. The cabin staff tried to mild her,warn her, admonish her, and until a stewardess noticed that this was the same woman whose picture was in the current edition of the in-flight magazine,attached to a profile of the Pet Shop Boys, for whom she had designed a set. "Are you Zaha Hadid?" she asked. Then the impossible became possible, or the architect got to change planes.
There are hundreds of stories like this about Hadid and they advise the same record,which is also that of her life: the testing of boundaries, the determination to get her way, and the fury,the indifference to practical constraints, the opposition of conventional society, or here represented by the cabin crew. And then the ultimate victory aided by fame,a fame earned through personality and talent.
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Source: theguardian.com