She's Gotta Build It

If it can be said that buildings are not so much made as born, then architect Zaha Hadid has been in labor an awfully long time. But it's finally time to break out the cigars. The most admired female architect in the world is bringing forth a veritable brood of buildings. The Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati, Ohio, the first major American art institution to be designed by a woman--let alone a woman born in Baghdad--has a construction starting date of December. A garden exhibition center in Weil am Rhein in Germany, her second building for furniture manufacturer Vitra, opened last month. And Hadid was just named the winner of a worldwide competition for a contemporary-art center in Rome, beating out such highly regarded designers as Jean Nouvel and Rem Koolhaas.

If there is an antithesis to an overnight success, then Hadid is it. She arrived on the architecture scene in 1983 when, at 33 (which is like seven in architecture years), she won a prestigious international competition to design a sports club on the Peak, the mountain in Hong Kong. The financing for that ambitious building fell through, but her drawings and the design--a dramatic cantilever jutting out of the mountain like a futuristic rock ledge--were wildly praised by the architectural fraternity.

It was a situation that would become familiar to her. She taught at the school at which she studied, London's Architectural Association, and kept winning big competitions but building only small projects, like restaurant interiors and a fire station, until 1994. That year she was engulfed in another tsunami of publicity when she won the international competition for the opera house in Cardiff, Wales. Almost as soon as her victory was announced, the controversy began. An outspoken Arabic woman proposing an intellectually demanding, uncompromising design in a Britain in which the future king publicly bemoaned the lack of pretty, traditional buildings was destined for a tough time. Slowly the promised funds for that project evanesced. But the seductive stylized drawings and paintings of her work, plus the fact that she was a female architect of consistent vision, backbone and--as a made-for-media bonus--booming voice, frank views and flamboyant wardrobe, put her in the awkward position of having fame and headlines aplenty but buildings few.

That's why the Cincinnati project was such a breakthrough for Hadid. First, most of the projected $23 million budget will be raised privately, so the design's fate won't be subject to the opinions of every person with a subscription to Architectural Digest. Second, Cincinnati's Art Center is no stranger to controversy. Remember the Robert Mapplethorpe exhibition in 1990? This is nothing. And last, Cincinnati, already home to a lot of smart architecture thanks to the University of Cincinnati, wants the building.

It's almost ironic that Hadid's design for Cincinnati should have the best chance of all her work of being built. The site is quite vertical, and Hadid's architecture is usually characterized by exaggerated horizontal plinths and floating fractured wedges. Her fondness for the stretch is expressed in Cincinnati partly by what she calls "the urban carpet": the street becomes the lobby floor, which slopes gently up and becomes the wall. It's also evident in the long, shallow staircase that slices through the building like a rapier. From this staircase visitors can get fleeting glimpses of the art from unusual perspectives, a pattern that's repeated throughout the gallery, which is punctuated with jagged openings (some bringing in light from the skylights on the top floor) and unexpected views. "Instead of seeing the sanctified object fixed in its niche," Hadid says about viewing the art, she wanted to "create a richer, more perplexing experience, taking your body through a journey of compression, release, reflection, disorientation, epiphany."

Her art center in Rome is much bigger, with a budget of $86 million. But her ideas are consistent. The building is a journey. Hadid used the barracks on which the art center is to be built as a footprint and imposed a "second skin" over the site. And in the just opened German garden center, she let pre-existing garden paths suggest the flow of the building.

Despite the tortuous turns in her career, Hadid says she's not bitter. At 48, she's still young for an architect. And she doesn't believe in glass ceilings. Unless, of course, she's thinking of designing one.