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In praise of … Zaha Hadid In praise of … Zaha Hadid
(5 months later)
This week's award of the Veuve Clicquot businesswoman of the year to Zaha Hadid just feels right. It doesn't matter what you think of her architecture (not that there's been much of it to see in this country); Hadid is a remarkable, and remarkably strong-minded, figure. She is an Iraqi-British woman in an industry that – as successive surveys from the Architects' Journal suggest – remains a white male club. She is also an architect with a firm view of what her buildings should look like: futuristic, deliberately chaotic, and often fun. Her BMW plant in Leipzig is deliciously egalitarian, sticking the suits and oily rags in the same building – and placing the assembly line over everyone's heads. Until recently, Hadid was more admired than commissioned, but her Aquatics Centre was the star building of the 2012 Olympics: a "vast turtle waving over-sized flippers", as the Observer wrote. Majestic, memorable, subversive: much like the woman herself.This week's award of the Veuve Clicquot businesswoman of the year to Zaha Hadid just feels right. It doesn't matter what you think of her architecture (not that there's been much of it to see in this country); Hadid is a remarkable, and remarkably strong-minded, figure. She is an Iraqi-British woman in an industry that – as successive surveys from the Architects' Journal suggest – remains a white male club. She is also an architect with a firm view of what her buildings should look like: futuristic, deliberately chaotic, and often fun. Her BMW plant in Leipzig is deliciously egalitarian, sticking the suits and oily rags in the same building – and placing the assembly line over everyone's heads. Until recently, Hadid was more admired than commissioned, but her Aquatics Centre was the star building of the 2012 Olympics: a "vast turtle waving over-sized flippers", as the Observer wrote. Majestic, memorable, subversive: much like the woman herself.
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