Dame Zaha Hadid

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 21 February 2016

⏱️ 35 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Kirsty Young's castaway is the architect, Dame Zaha Hadid.

The first woman to be awarded architecture's highest honour, the Pritzker Prize, she designed the Aquatic Centre for London 2012, Glasgow's Riverside Museum and has twice won the Stirling Prize - first for the MAXXI museum in Rome and secondly for her design for the Grace Academy school in Brixton, London. She recently became the first woman in her own right to receive the RIBA Gold Medal.

She was born in Baghdad in 1950 where her father was a prominent member of the opposition National Democratic Party. After attending school there, she travelled to Switzerland and England to boarding school before returning to London in 1972 to study at the Architectural Association.

In 1983 she won her first competition to design the Peak Leisure Club in Hong Kong. It gained her international recognition though it was never built: her first building was the Vitra Fire Station in Germany in 1993. In the late 1990s she built a contemporary arts centre in Cincinnati & a BMW car manufacturing plant in Leipzig. She won competitions to design a new opera house in Cardiff but it was never realised and her first permanent building in Britain was a Maggie's Cancer Care Centre in Scotland built in 2006. She has designed stations for the Nordpark Cable Railway in Innsbruck, Austria and in 2010 the Opera House in Guangzhou, China. In 2014 she became the first woman to win the Design Museum's Design of the Year Award for the Heydar Aliyev Cultural Centre, in Baku, Azerbaijan.

She was made a Dame in 2012 for services to architecture.

Producer: Cathy Drysdale.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello I'm Kirsty Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Disks from BBC Radio 4.
0:06.0	For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.
0:10.0	For more information about the program, please visit BBC.co.uk.
0:17.0	Radio 4. My My castaway this week is the architect Dame Zaha Hadid. From Brixton to Baku,
0:40.3	her buildings seem as distinctive and compelling as their Creator, exhilarating and yet
0:46.4	calming with sinuous soaring waves clad in milky glass, walls that appear to grow soaring
0:52.2	from the ground, complex geometrics that toy
0:55.7	with conventional notions of structure and form. She's won all the top awards going
1:01.1	and each new commission excites fevered interest. She is part of an
1:06.2	elite strata of designers, some people call them stark architects. But her present day status
1:11.7	at the very pinnacle of her profession did not come quickly or easily.
1:16.0	First, she taught for 10 years and through the 1990s designed endless structures that never got built.
1:22.0	It's almost as if technology has had to catch up
1:25.5	with the ideas in her head and they've always been there. Age seven she was
1:30.7	designing her own clothes. By nine it was rooms in the family home in Baghdad.
1:35.6	By the time she was 11 she was pretty certain she'd be an architect coming to London
1:40.5	in the early 70s to doggedly pursue her aim. She's been here ever since. She says, as an architect, if you
1:48.0	can in any way alleviate an oppressive situation or elevate a culture then I think that you should
1:55.3	so welcome Zaha Hadid and you think then I mean from that quote it would seem that you
1:59.3	think architecture has a lot of power the the power to do that.
2:02.6	I think so, yes.
2:03.6	Well, I mean, you know, I'm not in terms of the formonism
	...

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