Zaha Hadid: Between the Visionary and the Pragmatic

Despite the untimely death of its founder and leader, Zaha Hadid Architects remains one of the most active studios in London, producing designs all over the world. But in the early 1990s, when this interview was being held in her studio on 10 Bowling Green Lane in London, Zaha Hadid was mostly famous for her ‘quazi visionist’ projects with magnificent presentations that resemble abstract works by Kandinsky and Malevich rather than architectural designs of buildings and complexes… Since the establishment of partnership between Hadid and Patrik Schumacher, the studio had focused on computer and parametric planning strategies. The Parametricist Manifesto (2008) became the culmination of that direction. The parametric design guides Zaha toward searching for new relations between architecture and modeling of forms of field conditions, force lines and fluid processes in nature. Computer mathematics models evolutionary processes of the occurrence of natural forms in the living and non-living environment… Within the last decades, influenced by Schumacher’s parametric ideology, Hadid’s projects have more and more imitated the natural processes of creation of spatial and formal models resembling the organic world. The text given below, however, reveals the roots of Zaha’s architectural ideology, that developed at the edge of the 1980s and 90s on the basis of Russian avant-garde art and architecture, and partially hidden resonances with the inner world of the East.