In the fall of 2009, city buses rumbled through Rome plastered with close-ups of a windblown Zaha Hadid, promoting the opening of her National Museum of XXI Century Arts. MAXXI, as it is called, was leveraging the architect’s celebrity to advertise her more-baroque-than-Bernini new museum off the ancient Via Flaminia. So when the Iraqi-born Hadid stepped out of her limousine at a balmy museum opening in 2010—in a white off-the-shoulder tubular coat paired with sequin-spangled fingerless gloves and punky black boots—the paparazzi were waiting and ready. It was Anita Ekberg from La Dolce Vita all over again. The opening—after nearly a decade in the works (Rome wasn’t built in a day)—was a high-wattage moment that cemented Hadid’s celebrity. Like Evita or Liz or Beyoncé, Hadid was now Zaha.
Within all the Zaha brouhaha, however, there was a quiet, reflective moment. A thin, scholarly, soft-spoken 68-year-old gentleman in wire-rimmed glasses, Sinan al-Shabibi, governor of the Central Bank of Iraq, approached Hadid, then 59: Would she consider designing the bank’s Baghdad headquarters?
Al-Shabibi was the son of a statesman who had known Hadid’s own statesman father, Mohammed Hadid—both from grand, cultured, aristocratic Iraqi families. Like Zaha herself, al-Shabibi fils had spent decades in the Iraqi diaspora during Saddam Hussein’s rule. The economist was asking the London-based architect to come home—as he had done—and, in a way, asking her to build on the legacy of her father, who had been the nation’s finance minister after its July 1958 revolution, eventually drafting the law that nationalized the country’s oil industry.
The question was all the more poignant because she had reservations about the Arab world’s interest in her work, even as she began to receive commissions in the region late in her 40-year career. “My biggest failure has been in the Arab world,” she once stated in an interview. “I don’t think Arabs respect [me] enough, because I’m an Arab. Arabs like foreigners…. If I was an American, they would love me. An American man.” Moreover, the commissions she did receive had a high mortality rate, casualties of regime changes, oil price fluctuations, budget cuts, and the Arab Spring.
With the Central Bank and then a handful of other projects, Arab power brokers in more stable environments were coming around, calling her back to a world that had marginalized one of its own. “She was keen to work in the Middle East and was very interested in new opportunities there,” said Sara Sheikh Akbari, an Anglo-Persian associate director working at Zaha Hadid Architects. “She felt at home there.” In fact, her office saw exponential growth—and exponential fame—from around 2007 to 2011, and the Central Bank HQ was one of a half dozen personally gratifying Arab commissions from that period or shortly thereafter that are now opening or nearing completion this winter in an arc that stretches from Morocco to the Gulf.
Hadid’s fatal heart attack in 2016, at the peak of her career and talent, meant that she would never live to see nearly half of her major built designs, including the forthcoming projects. With some 30 substantial buildings completed in the past five years or in the pipeline, the architect has arguably proved as eminent in death as in life. And despite the internecine battles that have surrounded her estate (executors have fought in court for years), not since Eero Saarinen’s posthumous masterpieces, such as the TWA terminal and Dulles International Airport, has an architectural afterlife been so successful.
For her new Arab clients, Hadid was the right architect at the right time. Her avant-garde, world-class buildings are icons for a rising Middle East. Leaders keen on burnishing their country’s profile as a progressive state, while leaving a personal architectural legacy, commissioned photogenic monuments that would elevate its stature and cultural cachet. Charismatic in a way Hadid herself was charismatic, each “Zaha” declared its individualism and cultural independence: The slow liquidity of her lavalike buildings broke with the stiff classical columns of colonial times and Europe’s modernist boxes, grids, and symmetries. Besides, the forms were captivating, flowing like dunes: If you squinted, their sinuous lines recalled Arab calligraphy.
A Zaha would guarantee a city press and screen time. Her fame—she was an art world and Arab world rock star—would rub off.
Some of the commissions, like Iraq’s bank building, had a personal dimension. According to Hadid’s office, al-Shabibi told bank executives that there was only one architect to consider for their headquarters. Hadid was the most famous Iraqi alive, widely admired for her global triumphs. Her Joan of Arc aura, the pride her countrymen took in her success, and the trust in this native daughter with a historic family name (in a country where relationships matter deeply) all sealed the deal. After signing the contract at a formal ceremony attended by Iraqi diplomats at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, Hadid said that her father was “in the room.”
The 34-story concrete, glass, and steel skyscraper is now being topped out in Baghdad on the banks of the Tigris. The organically shaped mullions on its heliotropic façades intertwine like stalks, turning geometrically with the path of the sun to protect the building’s interiors from Iraq’s brutal solar load. Hadid and her team sculpted the blast-resistant podium in long, rolling contours; the spaces inside roil like white water. Hadid and her colleagues derived the forms from the angles of the sun and the flow of rivers. As if shaped by nature, it resembles a tall plant growing along the Tigris. Hadid also conceived the high-tech tower as a kind of college of construction, where local engineers, architects, builders, and artisans could tool up their expertise to competitive international standards: Her Iraqi peers did a crash course on the building.
Her office has worked on the skyscraper through Iraq’s recent turmoil, including the ISIS crisis—and, since 2014, without pay. Jim Heverin, the project director and one of the heads of Zaha Hadid Architects, says, “We’ve stayed involved because we wanted to do the building for Zaha.”
Like Frank Lloyd Wright with his cane, cape, and porkpie hat, Hadid branded herself wearing Yohji Yamamoto and Issey Miyake, topped off by her scorching-red lipstick, gravelly voice, and year-round tan. But her inventive designs, not her aplomb, earned her the commissions and the fame. Many of the projects were won in competitions, as in the angular, elasticized King Abdullah Petroleum Studies and Research Center (started in 2009 and finished in 2017) and the substantially completed King Abdullah Financial District Metro Station in Riyadh, where her design fulfilled high Saudi aspirations. “They wanted the best, most beautiful transportation project in the world,” explains project principal Gianluca Racana. “The aim was ‘iconicity’ ”—a building that could recognizably be identified with the city.
Drivers in this car-choked, freeway-gridded capital can now ditch their vehicles by parking in the belly of the metro station, a building that imports a Saharan mirage of stacked dunes into an otherwise eventless, treeless cityscape. The façade, a porous sunscreen of undulating arches, cools and veils the four stories and six rail platforms inside. Columns, bent and inclined in waves, brace against the thrust of decelerating trains. Like the wooden mashrabiya that cover windows of traditional Arab houses, the latticework shades the interiors, allowing breezes inside, induced by the whoosh of trains. The structure—which mixes transport with shopping, dining, and work spaces—breathes like a lung. “The movement of trains suggested air waves,” says Racana, “which recalled winds shaping the dunes that we evoked in the façade.”
If the architects imported the metaphor of the desert into the middle of the Saudi capital, they were dealing with the actual desert in the United Arab Emirates for a state-of-the-art headquarters in environmental and waste management. In 2013, Sheikh Sultan III of Sharjah, one of the emirates, convened six architects in his manor house in Sussex, England, to decide the winner of a competition for the Bee’ah center. He started by reviewing Hadid’s design, and the emir never quite made it past her models and drawings; he liked them so much that he had to be coaxed to see the others, and during the discussion, he investigated moving the site itself to a location where he could see the building from his palace.
Hadid and her fellow architects channeled the desert through the idea of wind. Using 3D modeling software to mimic patterns in nature, they composed a building of intersecting dunes that grow out of the sandscape, swept up into cresting shapes surrounded by an oasis of palms and pools. The architects punctured the dunes with computer-generated motifs that created dazzling constellations of light, evoking decorative Arab starbursts. For all its beauty, Bee’ah checks all the environmental boxes: LEED Platinum certification, a low carbon footprint, and solar energy captured and stored in Tesla battery packs.
.jpg)
As Hadid completed projects and became better known, powerful Arab figures came to trust her personally. Her commission for a soccer stadium in Qatar (which, among other new stadiums, will host next year’s World Cup) confirmed her friendship with Sheikha Moza bint Nasser, wife of the country’s former emir. When the influential sheikha asked Hadid to design temporary classrooms that could accommodate young Syrian refugees in Turkey, the architect accepted, taking on the program pro bono. Graceful, tentlike structures now serve grade-school students near the Turkish-Syrian border. Hadid’s resident mathematical genius, Shajay Bhooshan, helped plot out the billowing domes, engineering inexpensive, luminous polycarbonate sheets to provide natural light while protecting against the sun and heat.
Over the last several decades, the sophistication curve among Arab leaders has climbed steeply. For a younger set, sometimes educated in the West, Hadid became the cool architect for a generation that didn’t want the Louis XIV of their grandfathers or the bland, functional modernism of their fathers. So when Hadid’s submission failed to win a 2009 competition for an opera house in Casablanca, the king of Morocco, Mohammed VI, then 45, admired Hadid’s losing design and invited her to build the theater in the capital, Rabat. He would transplant the plaza-oriented concept to a former floodplain recently tamed by a new dam built upstream.
Hadid toured the site with her close business partner (and the firm’s heir apparent) Patrik Schumacher, along with an entourage of office colleagues and the governor of Rabat. Wrapped in a filmy shawl and wearing big, square sunglasses, she didn’t dress down for what was basically a site visit to see some land. “Zaha took a great personal interest in the project,” says Nils Fischer, her project director for Grand Théâtre de Rabat. The path of least resistance would have been to import the Casablanca design, which the king already liked. Instead, she proposed designing a building that responded to the riverine site and then proceeded to redesign the landscape itself by forming an island surrounded by the Bouregreg River and pools. “We started from the topography,” says Fischer.
The island and building would be a stepping-stone between the two ancient cities, Rabat and Salé, on facing riverbanks. The oppositional flows of the tidal river on the Atlantic drive the shape of the building, pushed and pulled into molten, glass fiber–reinforced concrete figures that merge with the contours of the island and riverbanks. The buildings lift, creating terraces and natural bridges and arches through which pedestrians will walk on landscape promenades. The forms tail around an outdoor amphitheater for 7,000; the theater inside seats 1,800, within a fractal hall partially hand-hammered in brass by artisans in Marrakech. Hadid has designed Morocco’s answer to the Sydney Opera House, and as a legacy of Mohammed VI, Grand Théâtre takes pride of place near an adjacent plateau occupied by the mausoleum that houses Morocco’s last two kings.
For Hadid herself, there was a private side to the business of building in the Arab world. Perhaps the monuments, for her clients, were symbols of cultural arrival, but for Zaha, the trophies were vehicles taking her back to her roots. The homecoming put her in direct contact again with a world she missed. Despite her often brusque demeanor and sharp tongue—she could swear like a truck driver—she had, as all her friends noted, “a huge heart,” and she was touched and gratified at the chance to reconnect with the culture of her youth, a culture in which her spirit resonated.
The sadness is that she will not be stepping out of a limousine at the opening, wearing a shimmering designer cloak and a pair of drop-dead shoes. But like her father at the ceremonial signing of the Central Bank of Iraq contract in London, she will be “in the room.” She signed all her buildings. There is Zaha in every Zaha.
Joseph Giovannini is an architect and critic. This month Rizzoli releases his book Architecture Unbound: A Century of the Disruptive Avant-Garde, which features Zaha Hadid among other creative rebels who redefined the architecture of our time.
— Inside the Sudden Disappearance of the Art World’s Most Wanted Man
— The Guy Who Bought Jeffrey Epstein’s Jet Has Some Regrets
— Eight Books We Couldn’t Put Down This Month
— Why Did the Palace Initially Keep the Queen’s Hospital Stay a Secret?
— The John Mulaney–Olivia Munn Rumor Mill Keeps Churning
— The Best Schitt’s Creek Merchandise
— The Story Behind Prince Harry’s Democratic Roots
— This Is 40 for Ivanka Trump
— From the Archive: In Her Majesty’s Private Service
— Sign up for “The Buyline” to receive a curated list of fashion, books, and beauty buys in one weekly newsletter.