Zaha Hadid: Who Dares Wins imagine...

The Russian artist Kazimir Malevich once said,

"We can only perceive space when we break free from the Earth.

"When the point of support disappears."

The Bergisel Ski Jump towers 250 metres above Innsbruck,

an instrument for high-performance sport,

shaped with mathematical precision.

Its creator is Zaha Hadid -

an architect whose buildings defy classification

and even gravity.

Zaha Hadid flies in the face of convention and far into the future.

Without that element of uncertainty, she says,

that sensation of travelling into the unknown,

there would be no progress.

In the last 30 years, Zaha Hadid has gone from

paper architect to global megastar.

Her extraordinary architecture doesn't just stand.

It melts, it slides,

it whooshes, it juts, it moves.

Her buildings make us feel like we're in another place,

another world even.

A Zaha-shaped world.

Zaha Hadid has won all the top architecture awards.

The Pritzker Prize for Architecture and the Stirling Prize, twice.

This year, she's even been named businesswoman of the year

by Veuve Cliquot.

Born in Iraq in 1950, Zaha Hadid is now a Dame of the British Empire.

'Zaha's story is absolutely fabulous.'

She is the greatest woman architect, not in the world now,

probably that ever lived, and she's right here in London.

You can touch her. Well, almost.

'She does demand attention and she gets it.'

She goes to the States and she has dinner with Obama.

She is a superstar.

'She's a fantastic gossip.'

She loves to hear about people. She's a great mimic.

She's a person that you wouldn't want to leave the room at dinner with

for the fear you'll find yourself the subject of conversation.

She is the nearest thing in architecture to the roundtable at the Algonquin.

'She relishes form so form for her,

'whether it is some form that she draws or form that she wears,'

or form that she lives with,

it's about an all encompassing vision.

She is a complete work of art.

'Zaha is, if you know her and if you understand her,'

a very inspiring person.

But you have to have patience.

You have to give her room.

If you try to constrain her then she will explode.

The winner is a great architect who happens to be a woman, Zaha Hadid!

APPLAUSE

I thank you very much.

My old accountant used to always tell the tax people that

I was a ditzy princess from the Arab world,

not knowing that I came from a family who did not believe in the monarchy,

but anyway...

Architecture is no longer a man's world.

This idea that women can't think three-dimensionally is ridiculous.

LAUGHTER

And also, I have great people,

I have a great partner Patrik Schumacher,

I have great associates with me in the office,

who are a mixture of men and women,

and they've all really contributed to this work.

-Old school building.

-So that was the school building?

This is an old school

but when we arrived, it was converted into studios.

Here is still the girls' entrance. The other side is the boys' entrance.

-You don't apply that rule today.

-Not any more!

We have now one studio and now we have the whole complex.

It's an almost improbable success story.

It took years for her career to take off.

The practice started life in just one room with four people,

and now employs almost 400.

It's a global brand with buildings all over the world.

And we broke through here. This is kind of reception.

-You want to see the main meeting room?

-Yeah.

But where, I wonder, is Zaha?

What kind of technology?

Most of them are printed. Now we have our own 3D printer.

-Does Zaha come to these meetings?

-Yes, yes, yes.

When she comes, she's sitting here and holding court if you like.

Ah. Today it seems, she's holding court at home.

So what we want to know is the nickname. What do you call Patrik?

-Potato.

-Potato.

He has many names, Patrik.

Potato, Fluffy, Cappuccino. Sinkapoo.

Would you mind interpreting?

Choo Choo. No, because Patrik does not respond to anything.

So we say, "Patrik? Patrik?"

And then ten times later, you have to have a name.

We say "Choo Choo" and he says "yes?"

But Potato happened a long time ago because he's German.

And Cappuccino, because he is fluffy. Like we say "where is Fluffy?".

We spend our day every day looking for Patrik for at least four hours.

Because he's off somewhere.

Because he's never at his desk or he's somewhere there.

We're all looking for Patrik.

It looks like a showroom, but it isn't.

It's home.

Many of these things Zaha designed herself.

She's loved playing with shapes, moulding her own world,

ever since she was a child in Iraq.

It was here, growing up in Baghdad in the 1950s,

that Zaha Hadid's vision of the world began to take shape.

It was a beguiling marriage of the old and the new,

of tradition and modernity.

Zaha, I'm looking at a picture of a little girl in a garden in Baghdad.

It's full of mystery, really.

Do you recognise her?

Yeah. I remember that picture.

What are you thinking, I wonder?

I don't know.

-I was preoccupied with something. I don't know what it was.

-You were.

I was a very curious child.

Do you mean you were curious about the world?

About everything, yeah. I used to walk around all day.

I was almost like an only kid because my two brothers were already abroad,

so I used to run around all day asking questions.

And so by the end of the day, my mum had had enough,

so when my father appeared back, he was very patient.

He answered any questions I wanted to know.

Zaha's father, Mohammed Hadid,

was the leader of the Iraqi National Democratic Party.

He'd been educated in England. It was a cosmopolitan household.

It's so extraordinary, this childhood of yours in Baghdad,

because the way you describe it, it's such a civilised place.

It was an amazing place, really.

Great people, very open society.

Fun.

You travelled a lot. Here's another picture, a lovely picture.

-Of me in Rome.

-In Rome.

And then I've also got this picture of you and your parents in Rome.

Same trip.

You look like a child who was loved.

I had a fabulous childhood.

I went to an amazing school. A nuns' school.

It was an interesting time.

Also, you were a Muslim girl in a convent...

The same with the Jewish girls.

We were obliged to go to chapel and pray and then I used to go home

and was wondering why my parents are not praying,

and they finally told me that, we're not really Christians,

and so I thought at the time, so why do I have to do that?

So we were allowed not to go to chapel...

for prayers.

We were brought up in that moment where there was

an interest in education, also an interest in architecture,

and so I think it was an interesting time.

Architecture was seen as a means by which Baghdad could build a new identity.

The city looked at the A-list of modern architects.

Frank Lloyd Wright, Alvar Aalto,

and Le Corbusier were all invited to design plans.

Walter Gropius' university building still stands as testament

to Baghdad's belief in modernist ideas.

'I think Zaha was given the sense that she could achieve whatever she wanted.'

It was a place in which modernity was just arriving.

Baghdad when she was a child was watching the Le Corbusier buildings going up,

there was a Gropius building,

the regime before the dictatorship was open to Western ideas

and believed that women had a place in that,

and that was something that was deep in her mind,

and she eventually picked it up and ran with it.

Looking at the interior of your parents' house,

this very beautiful picture.

The idea is very nice.

And those wonderful tiled floors, simple but beautiful cane furniture.

This chair, these seats actually were not cane.

They were made of steel.

-Wow.

-They were woven steel and painted gold.

This is the summer. You don't see a cover on the floor.

In the winter there would be a rug, a big rug.

It's interesting though because you're eight or nine years old

and you already know the layout of the furniture in the room.

I remember this very, very well. I wanted things to be done my way.

I wanted an adult's room. I didn't want...

a children's room, so I had designed this room, which my parents

made for me, and actually it was a very popular room,

so my cousin had one, my aunt had one,

so the whole family had one of these rooms.

-You designed the whole suite?

-Yeah.

Isn't that a bit unusual?

I think maybe by 11 years old, I was already wanting to become an architect.

And my generation,

there were lots of women who wanted to become architects.

It was not uncommon.

And there was some women, who were of the older generation,

who were already practising in Baghdad.

That's another weird thing for people thinking about what people

might think of Baghdad today.

The idea that women were treated...

What was interesting about that period in Iraq,

people had some level of freedom.

It was not such a weird thing to do.

You know, I thought, "I can design clothes," you know.

So I designed clothes which didn't work, you know.

But my mother would make me wear them, so I could learn a lesson.

But actually, what was weird, it was a punishment,

but actually, my friends all loved it.

They had never seen a dress like that, you know.

I would change the sleeve and cut it off,

or have a thing made which looked silly - they thought it looked silly,

I thought it looked great - and my friends all thought it was amazing.

I think the only reason I got away with it is

because I didn't like anything, you know, I was always, like,

"This thing itches me,"

"This thing doesn't work for me," so my mother said,

"OK. "I give you a salary," like a pocket money, my five pounds a month,

"and with that, if you want, you can go shopping."

Because she didn't want to be involved

any more in buying my clothes.

So by the age of seven, eight, I can choose my own things.

And I used to always...

I was astonished by other people,

that their mothers would pick their things for them.

I mean, both my parents were very liberal. I don't know...

I mean, you know, I wasn't privy to this,

but whether they decided to let me, you know, experiment

and see how far it goes.

That sounds so like the Zaha we know. That sounds like you.

-Yeah, well, that's how I was.

-Yeah, and that's how you are.

The only thing is that I was very shy.

Well, maybe I still am.

She may have been brought up in Iraq on the edge of the desert,

but in 1972, Zaha went from the Arab world, where modernists

were admired, to London, where architecture was in crisis.

Buildings which had once seemed like solutions to post-war

housing issues now seemed like problems.

The only conclusion that we can come to is to pull the bloody lot down.

Architecture was badly in need of new ideas and a new direction.

There was one place, however, that had imagination and vision.

MUSIC: "Suffragette City" by David Bowie

The AA, the Architectural Association,

in Bedford Square, was an incubator

for progressive ideas and innovation.

It was this school that Zaha headed for in 1972.

This most radical of schools in the world sits, and sat at that time,

in Georgian houses in Bedford Square,

and I think that's really indicative

that we occupied a historic building,

but in a very unexpected way.

So, it was literally a house of creativity.

Just at the time that the British economy

was really going down the drain,

it stopped building anything that anyone was interested in,

it found itself with perhaps the most powerful

and inspiring architectural school on the planet.

The visionary chairman of the AA at the time was

this man on the elephant, Alvin Boyarsky.

The AA under Alvin Boyarsky was all about exploring differences,

right out to the sort of tentacles that they could go to.

And so, it was literally explosive, because people were

in competition, as it were, but in a way, the energy went to everybody.

It was very anti-design.

It was almost a movement of anti-architecture.

The focus was that previous artists did not work,

let's have alternative life.

Alternative life meant experimentation.

Testing noise in a warehouse, or converting an old bus.

Students and teachers even set up a farm in Wales.

But not Zaha.

MUSIC: "Magic Bus" by The Who

I didn't want to go to Wales.

You know, and I wasn't going to do an inflatable bus. Some people did.

I mean, the noise from that welding machine, welding that bus,

is still ringing in my ear.

Then they decided to lift it with a crane,

because they didn't think about how they were going to get it

out of Jimmy's yard, so they lifted it from a crane and then

when it landed on the pavement, it just collapsed.

It all came apart.

FIREWORKS EXPLODE

CHEERING AND WHOOPING

There were also weird things going on,

doing workshops with the first-year master tutor

making love with one of his students on stage,

and the boyfriend running around, trying to kill him, you know.

The idea was that within all that mess, you will find your way.

-Very '60s, very hippie.

-Very '60s.

-Yeah.

And we did, because there was no-one else advising us what to do.

We had to go - if you are curious, we had to go to every jury in the

school, every presentation, and from that, suss out what is our next move.

Zaha stormed through the school, trying out all

the options on offer before settling on two teachers

whom she found inspiring,

themselves rising stars of radical architecture.

Any other questions?

She was definitely clearly talented and favoured by her tutors,

Rem Koolhaas and Elia Zenghelis.

It was clear from the beginning that she was

on a kind of unstoppable trajectory that would, that would...

I mean, it was very clear from the very first

moment that she would be a name in the history of architecture.

I'm really eternally grateful to them, because...

..they showed me a glimpse of what it could be like.

It was here that Elia and Rem led her, to the pioneering work

of Russian artist Kazimir Malevich and the Russian Suprematists.

Abstract and ground-breaking,

it was these exploding compositions that most inspired Zaha.

One of the triggers for Zaha's ideas

about how space might erupt from the ground,

how planes might intersect,

comes from that period in Russian art.

Her fascination for walls that grew out of the ground,

of oversailing planes,

might initially appear to be unbuildable and impractical

in a rectangular world, and yet, as we can see, these things do work.

I mean, Zaha really is a painter, I mean, it's a pity

that she doesn't paint any more, so much, like she did then.

And in fact, it was her painterly approach to composition that

was kind of transferred into her three-dimensional

architectural compositions.

Very much like Malevich himself.

Malevich was known as a painter of abstract canvases.

But by the 1920s, he was pioneering experimental architectural models

known as Arkhitektons.

"Down with cupolas," he said. "Let wedges cut into the bosom of space."

I do remember this incredible project of Zaha's,

which was a series of rectilinear buildings that were

scattered at odd angles across London, around the river.

And the plans and drawings were obviously Russian

in their inspiration, but had been applied to the city we all live in.

It was fabulous.

London was the destination for Zaha's student project, which

transformed Malevich's Arkhitekton into a hotel over the Thames.

A version of the original painting

has pride of place on her living room wall.

And that's the Hungerford Bridge, isn't it?

That's Hungerford Bridge,

and that is a Malevich tectonic sitting on Hungerford Bridge.

And this is one of the very early drawings where, you know,

the actual tectonic is also fragmented or broken.

So, this is in its process of kind of, like,

orbiting before it lands on Hungerford Bridge.

The plan for Hungerford Bridge

was something of a breakthrough for Zaha.

It was a time of change, too, for Alvin Boyarsky and the school.

So, within three years, that whole kind of what I call

metaphysical wanking has kind of, not dissipated,

it still carried on, but Alvin, by the late '70s,

shifted to what I always call a projected reality.

He wanted to push for projects which eventually could be realised.

But Zaha's projects were not be realised just yet.

After graduating from the AA,

she would remain at the school as a teacher.

It's what we all wanted to be at the time, the culture that

we were trained in was focused on experiment,

and on visions of architecture in cities.

And most of what was being built, particularly in Britain,

was pretty banal at the time.

You wanted to carry on, I think that's really it,

that the research, the excitement of being at the AA,

you didn't want to leave.

Zaha took over the unit, it was kind of,

it had a reputation as Unit Nine.

So, Unit Nine was first a unit with Rem and myself,

and then in the end, after that, it became Zaha's unit.

Those 10 years of AA teaching - well, it seemed like 30 years,

but it was only 10 - were, I think, very instrumental,

because everybody knew they were on the brink of discovering something.

We didn't know what it was, it was not premeditated,

we didn't know what it was, it was just, everybody knew, there was

so much energy around, such a buzz, on the staircase

and in the rooms, the whole punk thing

and the fashion scene and all these costumes on the street, it was

a phenomenal, very exciting time, what was going on.

Not in architecture.

I've never thought of you as a punk,

but actually, I think you are a bit of a punk.

But the whole atmosphere was about rebellion, you know,

and challenging the status quo.

Nobody wanted to be normal, you know.

But Zaha was not only teaching.

In 1979, she founded her own architectural practice.

She was teaching by day and drawing and painting by night.

So, I used to go out every night, I never drank,

so I would come back and I had this tiny mews house,

and I had my board there, my big painting,

and everybody knew I would be home after midnight,

so people would come over at night, used to honk their horn in

their cars or motorbike or whatever, and pop by at two in the morning.

I was always there. You know, I can paint and talk.

She would watch American Gigolo all through the night,

over and over again,

enjoying Richard Gere hanging from a bar upside down and doing pull-ups.

But they were always behind,

because by then I knew every scene in every one of his movies.

So I could only turn around

when I knew that my favourite scene would come up.

But it was the set design of a Hitchcock masterpiece

that really caught Zaha's eye.

The other one that she'd have on repeat was North by Northwest,

and in that, the mock-up of the UN building does look

remarkably like one of hers.

In 1983, when she was 33,

Zaha won her first prestigious international competition.

It was to design a clubhouse,

to be located on the mountainside above Hong Kong.

Her design was radical, but potentially, it was buildable.

The Hong Kong Peak competition paintings were absolutely

the sort of, you know, the eye-opener of all time.

Fabulous sense of colour, for instance.

Her three-dimensional grasp

is almost beyond everyday comprehension.

This extraordinary, huge canvas, which evoked the quality

of gravity-free building, The Peak was an explosion.

Nigel came in and he said, "How are you doing?"

I said, "I don't know, I've just won The Peak." He said, "What?!"

I had the juries in the school, and the students from other units

all brought champagne and it was just completely wild.

The landscape of Hong Kong was as significant in the way it was

drawn as the proposal for the building itself.

The detail of those urban landscapes was suppressed,

as though it was all a kind of rocky outcrop.

But within that vocabulary of relatively spiky

and jagged forms, you could see already the desire for fluidity.

The Peak was the peak and still remains a peak.

I have a feeling it is still the guiding or should be

guiding light forever.

Despite the brilliance and ambition of the project,

Zaha's client lost the site and it was never built.

Did you expect it to happen?

What did you feel when it didn't and how did you find out?

Well, I was sad. It was like in our grasp.

You know. And you know it could happen.

But it didn't.

And yet the Peak did put Zaha on the map.

Her work was attracting the attention of young architects

from all over Europe.

Patrik Schumacher was one of them.

So this is the famous Studio 9. It's the first space we had.

That's where I first knocked on the door of Zaha's...

So once it was one room or two and now

it's an entire complex of buildings?

Every one of which you entered and took over. You squatted...

One by one and picking up. Now we have another building.

Patrik first encountered Zaha's work as a student in Stuttgart in 1983.

She had won the Peak and that meant she was published.

Her publication was circulating around universities.

She was a star. A young star, 20 years before she was known

outside as a star.

What Patrik did next was apply for a job.

I had an interview, not with her, actually.

With one of her collaborators.

This was only a very small group at the time. Four people only.

I was hired and started work. It was very funny.

She didn't acknowledge my assistance for the first four weeks.

-I opened the door for him but I didn't want him there.

-You didn't?

-No.

-Why?

-I didn't like him. And I didn't want to talk to him.

-He got on my nerves.

-So there was initially no communication at all.

Not even a hello, an acknowledgement!

HE LAUGHS

Anyway, I sacked him every week.

He would be upset and go for a walk and there was another guy who walked

with him to calm him down and say don't worry,

she'll come around eventually.

So this was curious. But I was absorbed in the work.

I was getting on quite well.

How long did it take you for you both to get into a rhythm?

A few months.

-And...

-He's a really fantastic guy.

He's stubborn, my God.

But he's been an enormous support to me.

And he's also a very good designer. He is very smart.

And I think he's been an incredible asset.

You've got to have an ego, haven't you? How is Zaha's ego?

Huge.

It was ten years after winning the Peak that Zaha, now working

happily with Patrik, completed her first major built project,

The Vitra Fire Station in Germany.

Dramatic and abstract, it is unmistakably Zaha Hadid.

Helene Binet has been photographing Zaha's work ever since.

There's never been any building like this.

It's an absolute luxury in life to photograph something that you

have no reference.

Your image is about discovering, understanding

and not referring to anything else.

It's a gift.

From her images, it's apparent that the lines between art,

sculpture and architecture have been crossed.

Zaha hadn't just studied Malevich, she had absorbed him.

I could follow the process

and be then during the construction side, when the moment where it is

only concrete before the door, before the fire alarm, before anything,

where it's just structure, just the skeleton, just the concept,

the purist you can have. Like here, there will be a door later on.

But at the moment it's purely this incredible ceiling, roof standing

on some concrete. The sense of magic,

the sense of pushing the construction technology to the extreme.

She always had building where I think

the engineer must have had big headache!

She said I want to just forget about any gravity and let it flow

and it has to be concrete, heavy but free and light.

So...it was amazing.

She has created an incredible signature.

Concrete became something else, I think, after her.

Not a bad result for a project,

which started life not as a building at all, but as a chair.

That is what Vitra owner,

Rolf Fehlbaum originally commissioned them to design.

So why not the chair? Is that more difficult than a building?

It's not a trivial matter.

A chair is quite a difficult product.

We were in a different world. It's a very self-contained object.

It needs to be neat.

We were in a much more explosive territory.

The furniture we created were more kind of,

semi-usable, abstract interior landscapes.

So that didn't work.

He said, "Maybe the chair is too restrictive.

"How about if you do the fire station?"

HE LAUGHS

It's... "How about designing this building?"

Poor Rolf was so patient.

What an extraordinary building.

In that it actually allowed Zaha to

physically realise those early canvases,

which were all about slicing blade-like buildings,

sharp-edged like glittering sabres.

We had so many different approaches. We were never satisfied.

We kept holding back. Rolf said, "Oh, that's great. I want to build that."

We said, "No. It's not ready. We're unhappy with it."

I can remember at one stage Rolf calling me up and saying,

"Deyan, does she really want to build it?"

"Could she make a few decisions, please?"

But they're celebrating the 20th anniversary this year.

Rolf is one of her strongest supporters still.

Since completing the fire station in 1993,

Zaha has designed many buildings that haven't happened.

Her vast archive room contains models of her successes

and her failures.

To this day, I'm angry that this was not built. The Cardiff Opera House.

It was very buildable.

This would really have not only established her name rather sooner,

as an architect who could build, as opposed to

an architect who could draw

and paint and model.

But also it would have been the Bilbao Guggenheim

of England and Wales.

The crime was Cardiff.

That was really horrible.

-You won it not once but twice, really.

-Three times.

I don't know. It was a very strange situation.

I could easily have gone, you know...

-Hysterical!

-..crying, whatever.

Because we were treated very badly.

But they didn't want us. You know.

I don't know what they wanted, actually.

Cardiff in the late 1990s was not a place to try to build

an adventurous piece of architecture.

Especially if you were an adventurous Arab,

an adventurous Arab woman architect.

It was just too much for the city.

I was a nonentity. I was known here in the profession within London.

But in Wales, they didn't know me.

They...didn't expect me to win it.

The Millennium Commission,

which was going to be funding most of this, took against Zaha, I think

personally, and almost started a campaign against the building.

I was told by one of the leading Millennium Commissioners,

"This is unbuildable." Complete nonsense.

It's not unbuildable. It was perfectly buildable.

It was engineered by the same people who engineered the Sydney Opera House.

That is not a difficult building to build.

Yet this was the propaganda that was being put out at the time.

Many people thought the drawings we did were so obscure

and very difficult to understand.

But we do drawings of every kind.

The plaza sections are not the same as a normal building.

It's not a square building. Or a rectangle.

That project was easily... Could be easily done.

There was a lot of prejudice against who she was.

Oddly enough, not just because she was of Iraqi origin,

not just because she was a woman, but because she is from London.

There was that there as well. "You, the Millennium Commission,

"are parachuting in poncey London architects down to our capital

"in Wales and telling us

"that we're going to build some oddly-shaped thing.

"Thanks very much. What's Welsh about that?"

What a bad decision those Welsh guys made. Really stupid.

There they had this fabulous architect,

with this fantastic design and they blew it.

They just completely blew it.

And one could boycott Wales forever, just on that basis. Why not?

I think we gained a lot of strength through it. And enormous support.

Honestly, until very recently, if I'm at the airport

or in a restaurant or on the street and people come to me

and say, "We're Welsh and we're sorry what happened."

It deserved to win the competition. It's a masterful piece of work.

I'm just so sad it was never built. That's Britain for you.

Zaha's work has always been distinctive.

These paintings, concepts for different projects,

are works of art in their own right.

For ten years...

Well, maybe five years after Cardiff, we were absolutely stigmatised

everywhere because people thought that's such a bad karma,

bad something. We don't want them.

We did a number of competitions. We lost all of them. And then...

Why did you lose all of them?

Well, maybe it was too radical, too unusual at the time.

Maybe too sketchy. That continued most throughout the '90s.

So we've lost most of what we've been doing for over a decade.

What did it feel like to be in an office where you know you've

got this powerful presence and creativity

and yet you don't win anything?

There was always the optimism and hope that the next one will be it.

The thing that kept me going is that I really enjoyed the work.

It was very tough.

I feel the times I enjoyed the most were the toughest moments.

We were left to develop these ideas through competitions.

I always thought at the end, we'll win.

Competitions are almost an invitation to push the boundaries

of possibility and to offer things that other people can't think of.

Therefore, that's what she's good at. And that honed her abilities.

We had no money.

These people just...

..didn't let go.

Patrik was to teach in Germany but he wouldn't

charge me for working in London because he knew I had no money.

I couldn't pay him. I think, in the '90s, honestly, none of us slept.

For ten years we were maybe ten people but we did work for

the equivalent to 100 people.

It was... That increased our repertoire.

So when we did get work eventually,

it wasn't so difficult because we had tested every option.

It's only because we worked on every competition, we killed ourselves

until we won Cincinnati.

And one year we won Rome, Wolfsburg, the Ski Jump, one after the other.

The flourish with which to exit the wilderness years came in 1999

with her winning entry to design a contemporary museum for Rome,

a baroque city not famed for its modern buildings.

You could call MAXXI modern baroque.

It seems appropriate that someone who is as much an artist

as an architect should design a museum for art and architecture.

Completed in 2009,

it won the prestigious Stirling Prize the following year.

The museum space of the MAXXI is a completely fluid space.

And you can see from here how it is not easy to

distinguish between gallery and movement space.

Concrete can become something incredibly elegant,

incredibly beautiful, a smooth,

sweet surface that takes you round the building in a beautiful way.

It's an architettura dolce. Molto dolce.

We are in the lobby here.

And when you see all the movement around, you can

think of the Guggenheim by Frank Lloyd Wright.

In this case, this is the highest point of architectural

excitement, I would say, in the building

because it is where you can see all the galleries.

It is a panopticon that lets you understand more or less

the organisation of the space of the building so it is most important.

And it is also where the people meet.

Look, an actual card model,

and it is getting that sinuousness of the whole building.

You've got these deep, very thin concrete blades

coming down over your head to mitigate the daylight.

You can pick holes in it.

The old building at the front it kind of erupts from like some

kind of body.

There is always this implication of the building's tendrils,

just going on further, taking over other structures,

almost like a kind of self-generating city.

The fluidity is to do with what one calls streams.

It is like a delta of rivers where they are frozen in time.

And by bifurcating and crossing, it also acts as a structure

so that it makes it rigid or stable.

And it forms courtyards.

Rome wanted a gallery for art that did not yet exist.

A truly futurist project. MAXXI is modern baroque, fluid baroque.

We think of the 21st-century art as an art

we don't really know what it's materiality would be about,

if it will be about materiality, if it will be about relations,

about movement, about performance, about physical stuff.

So the museum itself is a dynamic concept which transforms

itself into space.

It is the most demanding art space one could possibly imagine.

There are parts of it which feel like being thrown into a washing machine

and spun around on your head, which I find personally rather exciting.

And it is something which initially artists find difficult.

But they will respond to it and they will find ways to make it work.

The challenge for Zaha

was not easy because there wasn't a curator at the time

so there wasn't a clear precise programme for the building.

So it was somehow the architecture that shaped the life of the museum.

I think that it got a level of attention from Zaha

and from Patrik which maybe, once they became globally famous,

doing lots of projects all over the world, huge staff, etc,

maybe that level of attention, inevitably,

as with all architects at that level, starts to drop off.

But this, it has got forensic levels of attention on it.

And the fact that it was done really pushing what was

possible at a time when a technology was just coming in to make

other forms possible, makes this significant for me.

So I would say, best of early Zaha, MAXXI in Rome.

Whilst MAXXI was still being built,

they won and completed two commissions in Germany.

A BMW factory and a science centre in Wolfsburg.

They're two very different buildings.

The BMW building, I suppose,

you could say belongs to the jagged period.

But the Wolfsburg project is a remarkable invention of a building

which sits on giant concrete legs like some kind of elephant.

It was like a kind of Sydney Opera House of its time,

by which I mean an architect designs a building which then

the technology has to, in a sense, catch up with.

How do you build something like this?

It deals with very complex geometries,

which are there in nature, clouds and everything.

But up until that point, we hadn't imagined them, you only imagine

how you'd draw that or how you make it stand up after you have drawn it.

But once you have cracked that, what you suddenly realise is that

was the small problem, the bigger problem is how you make it real.

The norms of horizontal surface and a vertical surface disappear,

things go through a transition. They are neither horizontal nor vertical.

Therefore the interrelationship has to act as one big thing.

To simulate the forces of gravity in something like that,

rather than pieces and putting it together, was a massive challenge.

It took us nearly 18 months to get computers to a level

and we worked with software manufacturers to push

the software as we were designing the building to a level where we

could actually understand the gravitational forces of that.

I'd never admitted to her

that this building does not stand up, for about two years.

I could not face the idea of telling her, not only can't we draw it

but I don't think we can actually make it.

We'd already won the job and we were starting on site.

There is an element of fear in the whole relationship.

You don't want to let her down.

The science centre in Wolfsburg marked a step change in her practice.

It was a conceptual leap away from the jagged towards

the elephantine - the snaking, the snail-like.

Made easier by what became known as Parametricism, of which Zaha

and Patrik were pioneers.

Parametric design is fundamentally where you allow the computer,

you feed it various ideas and then you allow it to invent form

that you probably couldn't do in your mind.

It is of such complexity that your brain couldn't think of it

and your hand couldn't sketch it.

What has been extremely fertile is to look back at nature

and the way it handles complexity,

and there are ways of doing this now with new tools.

The new tools, first of all, we don't repeat elements,

we always vary it to modulate elements.

Instead of saying we have only one option, we just give you

nearly random like nature, you just produce multiplicity.

Gratuitously differentiation.

And then we look at, yes, we could use these differences

so there is a kind of evolutionary

process of variation, selection and then reproduction.

So like nature would do it.

Your hair does not grow everywhere the same,

it adapts itself to different contours, to different densities.

Then you can follow the vector of transformation.

The fact that we can look at things three-dimensionally

in the computer, we can stretch them and pull them apart,

connects very well with the parametric idea that

if you depress a point or stretch it the other bits move with it.

Just as when you are designing a car.

People always misunderstand this whole thing about computing.

They think...

"They don't know what they are doing, they just press a button

"and the computer does it." That is of course totally idiotic.

For me, architecture is all about framing social interaction,

social communication and with some of our buildings you get that feeling.

There is always that space of flying, where you have, for instance,

a lobby space where you see things below, above, in layers all around.

If you go to buildings now also, you need atriums,

you need to have an overview. What is happening in all these floors?

Who is coming and going?

So we need to sense what everybody is doing so that is why I think these

environments are so important, they become an interface of communication.

In our architecture, with every step new vistas open and close.

So that is why they are called information richness,

that kind of perceptual density of offerings.

It might seem like pure architectural theory,

but there are certainly new vistas in Innsbruck.

You could say the Ski Jump is pre-parametric.

It is still angular although odd angles.

It is middle period Zaha.

Another Zaha, a different Zaha can be found just across the valley.

The Nordpark Railway takes off into pure parametric diversity and curves.

Project architect Thomas Vietzke takes us on a tour.

The Congress Station cantilevers in one of the main pedestrian

accesses of Innsbruck and people's curiosity should be triggered

because they see something foreign or unusual to them.

At the same time, via these cantilevers,

and via these very open floating roof shelves,

we wanted to create a space that is very open and very transparent so it

integrates into the flow of the city and it is welcoming to the visitor.

Trains go from the city to the mountainside in under nine minutes,

over a Zaha-designed S-curved bridge.

It is the idea to create a lively space.

It is not only the kind of space where you transit through,

but people are also gathering around the station,

looking at the architecture, looking at each other.

We hope, and today I feel that you have this sense that it

is becoming a destination in its own right, so to speak.

This has been a fantastic site above the river about 1,000 metres

so you really had to make something from these vistas.

That is why this station is articulated like a plateau,

above the city.

It is almost pulled out of the steep mountainside

and it darts in the direction of the valley.

It is like a piece of melting ice sitting in the landscape

like a piece of a glacier.

The substructure is all concrete in a steel frame

and they are clad in this frosted...

this milky glass. They look like ice dribbles.

There is no demarcating line between these things so it could

look like a wing, it could look like an icicle, whatever.

It is kind of a novelty in terms of its form, in terms of its shape.

It is new for Innsbruck.

It is not a wooden typical log cabin that you find

sometimes in Tyrolean architecture,

but it relates to the natural landscape of the Alpine regions.

The complexity of these geometries is challenging to control.

The fluidity, the non-repetitiveness of the forms.

We used particular software in order to generate

but also to control these shapes.

So the shapes are made possible by parametricism and computers.

But there's more to it.

There is also a spiritual thing, you know, do you want to do angular

or do you want to do curves?

And the budget, frankly the budget is for curves.

Frank says this, Frank Gehry says, "A flat piece of something, one dollar.

"A single curve, two dollars.

"Double curve, ten dollars."

That just about sums it up.

If a double curve is ten dollars,

this building is priceless.

Completed this year, though not yet open,

it's the most extreme yet of Zaha's designs.

It's organic, rolling.

It slips and slides like Plasticine.

It's a new cultural centre in Baku,

capital of the once-Soviet state of Azerbaijan,

a huge show-off project for the ruling family.

It gave Zaha the opportunity to really stretch her wings.

It's the ultimate Zaha experience.

It's really basically three buildings.

There is a library, convention centre, and a museum,

and they kind of merge into one.

And it's a very odd city because it's a mixture of

Russian neoclassical and Soviet architecture.

Baku's skyline is changing.

New building are transforming the city at a rate of knots.

Yet Azerbaijan's past is still apparent

in the lives of the everyday Azeri people.

Since the discovery of oil, Azerbaijan's economy

has been one of the fastest-growing in the world.

Evidence of this new wealth abounds in Baku's boulevards.

You arrive there and as soon as you get out of the aeroplane

you smell the petrol. It's very strong.

You feel that it was a Communist country, all the big buildings,

and now suddenly they want to make it beautiful,

so they build new buildings, but they also make this fake facade.

And behind you have all the old Soviet buildings.

And it's quite dark and grey.

And then you arrive at Zaha's site,

and you have this explosion of white.

And the light is very strong when it's sunny, so it's really white.

It's like a flower.

I don't think there's any building like that -

it's a real palace - in Europe, been built since, maybe...

I don't know, since Louis VIX with Versailles.

It's a completely immersive field.

It's re-examining the idea of the block.

So it's not very much a block, it's not a building with a tower.

It's very exhilarating, also it can be very calming,

it's like going into the park.

Because it has that kind of rock-like,

landscape-like quality, fluid quality.

We found very good people to do all the tiling,

which is vacuum-formed.

I think the idea was to make a completely seamless building,

so the landscape literally crawls up the edge of the building

and becomes like a mountain.

It was very important that whatever we propose

breaks away from the rigid, monumentalist Soviet architecture.

We wanted to reflect Azerbaijan's sensual side.

Turn the corner, and this building changes.

With every angle, every turn,

it reveals something new and unexpected.

It's one of the most remarkable structures I've ever seen.

There's a romanticism involved.

And we wanted to do something very sensual,

and at the same time, we wanted to do something very strong.

Traces of Zaha's buildings, their outlines and curves,

can be found in more ancient surfaces.

Look closely and you'll see in this Arabic calligraphy familiar shapes.

Carved before us is a line of fluid forms,

like Zaha buildings set in stone.

Fluidity in architecture in this region always existed.

So if you look at Islamic architecture

you always see the calligraphy or ornamental floral patterns

running through all the interior surfaces

from carpets to walls to ceiling to dome.

In our case, we used fluid spaces,

which is continuously running and without being iconographic

or without looking at the past,

can relate to a region's understanding of architecture.

It's like surfing.

Like the way when the wave breaks it builds from the ground

and creates like a circular kind of arc.

This building is as extraordinary inside as it is out.

From every floor and angle, it awes and astounds.

Spaces unfold for conferences, concerts and exhibitions.

The building is not yet open to the public.

Its spaces wait in anticipation of any activity.

Its only residents are the government workers

who are tucked away behind the scenes,

and the cleaners who ceaselessly polish its surfaces.

Zaha knows how to push us, the designers,

the architects, to the limits.

Always there is a pressure for innovation,

and I think that's a good kick.

Zaha's always had people who were very eager to work for her,

because in the architectural profession,

particularly amongst young people, she is a goddess.

You know, she's very, very important, and very exciting to work for.

Extremely difficult to work for -

I would imagine. I've never worked for her.

Zaha is, if you know her and if you understand her,

and if you make allowances for the strength of her personality,

is a very good collaborator.

Very inspiring person.

But you have to have patience

to make these allowances.

You have to give her room.

If you try to constrain her, then she will explode.

Are you a tough boss?

I don't think so.

I mean, if somebody is taking the piss, excuse my language, I am tough.

But actually I'm a pushover.

This is the biggest of Zaha's British achievements to date.

The London Aquatics Centre -

an iconic wavelike structure

that landed two years ago in the Olympic Park.

Its temporary seating wings are currently being removed

to reveal its true, more fluid shape.

It's a clear contrast with her first building in the UK,

an angular Maggie's Cancer Care centre in Fife completed in 2006.

In the years since, she's designed a Museum of Transport in Glasgow,

and a school in Brixton, London - the Evelyn Grace Academy.

This is London's latest Zaha building, and finally,

her first in the centre of the city.

It looks like a tiny piece of Baku

has just landed in Kensington Gardens.

It's a renovation project of sorts, and still a building site.

It's a Zaha-designed extension to the new Serpentine Gallery.

It will be a restaurant and social space,

housed under what feels like a floating roof.

Very nice.

I want to become a photographer.

Coming full circle, now that you are building all over the world,

are there things you really want to do, still,

which you are passionate about, in certain parts of the world?

-London, for instance?

-Yeah, I really would like to

do something in London, only because I've lived here most of my life,

and whenever you come across a site or a situation

you always imagine what it would be like if you did something there,

how it would be different.

So there's like 40 years of imagining things to happen, you know,

in London.

And I do have an interesting take on the city,

but also through teaching many years ago,

I did always a London project, because I was curious about London.

Also, at that time, people really looked at buildings.

We would go out and we would travel

to lots of countries to look at projects.

Then that changed, people started looking,

travelling and doing esoteric stuff, looking at landscape.

Which was also very important, but...

So I think it gave us also knowledge in how in one's head

to superimpose one reality on another.

So I always had these projected realities on London,

and that's why I have always wanted to build here.

So there is still a big opportunity for the city of London.

Yeah, I personally think there is, yeah.

It's maybe easier to achieve these things

in places like Beijing than London,

not because of regulations,

but because, you know, you need to kind of convince people

that it is possible to inhabit the city in a different kind of way.

Anybody who is a pioneer has massive challenges.

And Zaha is somebody resolutely of her own time,

but also well ahead of her time.

And it's like night follows day.

It wouldn't matter whether she was called

Zaha Hadid, John Smith or Mary Jones. It is... That's the territory.

And it's a very tough territory to inhabit.

What is so fantastic is the recognition she now has.

And rightly so.

And so this is a moment of incredible flowering for her,

but she is a pioneer. She's still a pioneer.

Up to 20 years ago, people did not anymore

believe in what I always call the fantastic.

They did not think that world was possible.

Some people still don't think it's possible. And it is.

You know, we do this, really,

so you can be in a very simple space like this and feel good.

And it's as simple as that.

Maybe they can loan it to us while it's empty.

To have a party.

We can have a potato party here.

What kind of a party?

A potato party.

I don't know why you put up with it.

We want to do a party serving every kind of potato.

But it looks like a potato chip anyway.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd