Text and photos © Hugh Pearman. First published in The Sunday Times, September 11 2005, as "Queen of the block".

Zaha Hadid is predictable in only one thing: at some point - usually sooner rather than later - she will say or do something jaw-dropping. In Copenhagen last week she was over to launch her latest building, an art museum extension. She didn't speak for long, but long enough to declare that just about nobody in her large office could draw except her. That's them told. The top cat is the one with the pencil, not the computer.

Later she held court in a restaurant up the coast designed in the 1930s by Denmark's modernist pioneer and architect-designer hero, Arne Jacobsen. This is a white-modern shrine, a Holy of Holies. After various people had stood up to toast her, Zaha too got to her feet. She was nice to all the right people. Then she looked around her, and lost it. "Whose idea was it that the best fun you can have in Copenhagen is to have dinner in a sanatorium?" she drawled, adding: "I'm off to the toilet."

Zaha, you will have gathered, is not a tactful type. She speaks as she finds, in a rich bourbon-and-Marlboro accent (though she does not drink, and says she has not smoked for four years). Some find this frankness alarming, some enchanting. But if you are one of the world's dozen top architects, and the only woman to enjoy that role - let alone a woman who is Iraqi-born - well, she can say what she likes.

This is not unusual in the rarified world she inhabits. Most of the best, most in-demand international architects behave in an equally high-handed fashion: she's just matching the boys in America's exclusive Pritzker Prize club, shot for shot. What makes her cherishable, however, is that unlike most of them, she always lets the mask slip in public. An off-script thought strikes her, and out it comes. And then she shrugs and smiles in her toothy way, as if to say - oh well, ain't nothing but the truth. Frank Gehry and Norman Foster and Renzo Piano and her old boss and chum Rem Koolhaas do not act quite like this when they are let out. Which makes Zaha, I reckon, a national treasure to set alongside volatile Britartist Tracey Emin. Gawd bless yer, Ma'am!

She's a lot more relaxed than she used to be, doubtless because she's building stuff everywhere. She's happy to gossip about her chances in the forthcoming Stirling Prize against the likes of Foster and the office of the late Enric Miralles, he of the Scottish Parliament building. Her assured BMW factory in Leipzig, which in an act of theatrical bravura brings suspended car shells clanking through the office atrium, is fancied by many. She says she has no expectations, but she stays with the conversation, has a sneaking admiration for Miralles.

The £4.5m Ordrupgaard Museum extension is something of a footnote in the onward march of Zaha. Won in competition at a time when she didn't have so much work on, it is a small, fluid exercise in black concrete and glass which doubles the display space of this bijou rural gallery of French Impressionists on Copenhagen's northern fringes.

Architects cannot help influencing each other: the trick is to stay ahead of the game. So Zaha's jagged, splintery early style, now adopted in diluted form by many others, is conspicuously absent here. The curves and loops of the continuous concrete slab forming floor, walls and roof are a much softer proposition. Moulded concrete, however, is not a technology the Danes are very familiar with, and some of this building - in particular the way the rectilinear steel-framed glazing system is cut to join the double-curving roof slab - looks a little botched. The join is anything but neat. Mention this to Zaha, and she just agrees. Yes, she says. It was a bother getting it built. They did it much better at Leipzig.

This insouciance shows through in other ways. Most architects of art galleries go to absurd, complex lengths to get filtered daylight coming down from above. Zaha just slashes simple gashes in the concrete roof and puts in something opaquely translucent. And where there are particularly sensitive drawings and watercolours to protect, she leaves out the daylighting altogether. It works. What's the problem? In the downstairs gallery - where there's a good Gauguin show - two of her walls lean backwards, so putting the pictures on a slight slant. The curators love what they call this "easel-angle". Zaha shrugs again. Easels? What easels? She just did sloping walls, that's all.

It was a treat to behold, Zaha among the Danes. The Nordic regions embracing Babylon. An unlikely meeting, but they got there before the British. Famously the English Establishment in the form of the Millennium Commission did everything in its power to stop her Cardiff Bay Opera House getting built, and - aided by a local hate campaign - succeeded. Being given the Mind Zone in the Millennium Dome to do was scant compensation. Moe recently she's won an opera house in Guangzhou, China, which must help.

Now a number of British buildings are pending - a Maggie's cancer-care centre in Fife, a transport museum in Glasgow, the headquarters of the Architecture Foundation in London - and most prominently the first of the 2012 Olympic buildings to be allocated, the London Aquatics centre with its rather beautifully undulating roof. Very different from her next, imminent, completion: the Phaeno Science Centre in Wolfsburg, Germany, which is like some prehistoric amphibian lurching across the landscape. In a slightly scary way.

Where is Zaha's architecture heading? She admits to no influences beyond Russian Soviet constructivists such as Melnikov. But at the moment it looks a bit Scandinavian, oddly. Somewhere on the faultline between two great Finnish architects: Alvar Aalto with his wavy ceilings, and Eero Saarinen, a master of organically-shaped moulded concrete buildings in the United States in the 1950s. Oh, and there's a bit of Frank Lloyd Wright starting to creep in now. Who'd have thought it? But that's Zaha: off the wall.

More on ARCSPACE (http://www.arcspace.com/architects/hadid/ordrupgaard4/ordrupgaard4.html)
Zaha Hadid WEBSITE (http://www.zaha-hadid.com/)
ORDRUPGAARD (http://www.ordrupgaard.dk/eng/index.html) Museum

Zaha Hadid WEBSITE

Not being funny, but I'm always suspicious of anyone who has a picture of themselves on the front page of their website. It seems like her own personal shrine to herself!!

Not being funny, but I'm always suspicious of anyone who has a picture of themselves on the front page of their website. It seems like her own personal shrine to herself!!

Yea, sort of having your oil painted portrait above the fireplace!

Not being funny, but I'm always suspicious of anyone who has a picture of themselves on the front page of their website. It seems like her own personal shrine to herself!!
And a discreet mention of her Pritzker prize.

This is not unusual in the rarified world she inhabits. Most of the best, most in-demand international architects behave in an equally high-handed fashion: she's just matching the boys in America's exclusive Pritzker Prize club, shot for shot.

I was thinking that before I got to this point...

Zaha's ego always was as famous as her buildings. Every article about her have focus on her personality.

TELEGRAPH (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?view=DETAILS&grid=P8&targetRule=10&xml=/arts/2005/08/16/bahadid14.xml) article

Interesting realization. :wondering

‘The frustration is that when you start, 100 per cent is about design. But as you go along time is spent less and less on design and it is all about negotiations with the people in your team, with the client, with the engineers, with the consultant.’

I wonder if she enjoys what she does anymore. From the telegraph article it almost sounds as if she is channeling anger and discust with what she sees or perhaps does now. This of course is only the perception of this article, but still.

‘I no like it! Understand? Capisc?’ :bang head

'Saleem can’t do it. He can’t model. He is hopeless. It is embarrassing. Am I really going to do a black ceiling with this s— coming out of it? I mean honestly!’ :bang head

‘Look at the plan! She’s out – out! This is her last day. :bang head

Definitely wouldn't want to be working for her. Even if this was one of her bad days.

She didn't speak for long, but long enough to declare that just about nobody in her large office could draw except her. That's them told. The top cat is the one with the pencil, not the computer.

if that is the case... why the f___ are all of the presentations coming out of her place computer generated... why are they not showing the brilliance of her hand drawing skills... looks like yet another wanker speaking out of their a___

cheers
Trevor

if that is the case... why the f___ are all of the presentations coming out of her place computer generated... why are they not showing the brilliance of her hand drawing skills... looks like yet another wanker speaking out of their a___

cheers
Trevor

Exactly, "yeah I'm good with a pen - I think - if I can remember!"!

Sounds like anyone who gets to a status level she has reached - can say what she likes and no one will challenge, sounds like Fig Jam to me!

FIG JAM - F^%K I'M GOOD, JUST ASK ME!

A friend of mine told me that when she did the firehouse in Weil am Rhein, she arrived at the site with a slave that followed her around and jotted down every word she said. She ran around, pointed from one corner to the next,angrily gesticulating and ranting about bad workmanship and wrong details.

I would have loved to see it on film.

When the building was finished, the firemen realized that they couldn't really use the building for its designated purpose and moved out again. It was a showroom for Vitra the last time I was there. :D

Well the lady has got balls and that's what keeps her out of "Home decorator" or the likes , or else from hypothetical projects that never see the light of day .
Of course I would not like to be in Saleem's shoes :D .

if that is the case... why the f___ are all of the presentations coming out of her place computer generated... why are they not showing the brilliance of her hand drawing skills... looks like yet another wanker speaking out of their a___

cheers
Trevor

I guess that she just tried to tell "I'm the boss here". I see the pencil vs. computer thing like an analogy for creation vs. production. A couple years ago I visited the office of Paulo Mendes da Rocha (well-known brazilian architect) and there's only one computer for his secretary to manage e-mails. All the executive drawings are made by another minor office.
I think that after getting recognized, many architects let the "hard work" to employees and do just the main concept of the projects, not worrying about every single detail. I know Oscar Niemeyer works this way and I've heard the same thing about many others (Jean Nouvel, Sir Norman Foster...)

:confused:

:: thank god for Hadid... deep down the is a pussycat!::

Good luck trying to figure out one of those scary exploded perspectives.

I think she started executing buildings by the same time she started working with computerised drawings. Because people (clients) started believing they could be done. But this is just speculation on my behalf. :wondering