By John Seabrook
The New Yorker, Mar 31, 2016
(Image: Zaha Hadid died in Miami on March 31, 2016 at the age of sixty-five. Photo: Peter Marlow/Magnum)
I have never known anyone whose reputation provoked more terror yet whose actual presence was more fun than Dame Zaha Hadid’s. There have always been difficult personalities in architecture. The profession itself seems calculated to make one egotistical and intractable. But it always amazed me that Hadid had somehow attracted a singular reputation for being difficult to deal with. Compared with other prominent architects, no one was more down to earth, more exuberantly real, than her.
On the occasions that we spent together when I was working on my 2009 Profile and then, more recently, at a 2015 New Yorker Festival event, I was struck anew by the warmth and humanity that this supposed harridan radiated. The scary starchitect of popular imagination was just that, a fiction. Why was it necessary? Why did every second article attach “diva” to her name? Isn’t every architect a diva? Read more…