IMAGE: ©ZAHA HADID ARCHITECTS
The Mathematics Gallery at London’s Science Museum was a passion project for Zaha Hadid. It is due to open in December
Patrik Schumacher in his own words When did you become aware of Zaha Hadid?
She was a star in the 1980s before I even stepped foot into her office. She had a radical influence. In schools of architecture around the world students looked at her drawings and started started to imitate them. That landscape-like flow was hugely influential. What do you see as Zaha’s
was enormous pressure. She was very intense, and therefore could be very unhappy if things weren’t coming together, but that was born out of this will for excellence. She was able to maintain close friendships with staff and students, people from all walks of life. There was no snobbery at all about her. She had very few filters in terms of formality in intimate circles. She was very frank, very entertaining and fun.
greatest achievement?
Something she could have achieved without ever having built anything, which is the radical transformation of what it means to design the repertoire; the fluidity, the curvilinear nature of it, the dynamism of the language she explored in her paintings What was she like as a person?
She was very, very driven in terms of always excelling, always outshining everybody else – in terms of the competition there
CLAD mag 2016 ISSUE 3
How did you feel about the Brexit vote? Will this impact you?
My hope is that with the new situation there is a chance to manage immigration more sensibly. We need to search the whole world labour market for talent and skills rather than being so focused on Europe versus the rest of the world. At ZHA we have people from America, Latin America and Asia and we need to go back into these regions. I love
We need to search the whole world labour market for talent and skills rather than being so focused on Europe versus the rest of the world
a larger portfolio so that you are more robust in case something goes wrong in one arena. I also like the idea of having more resources to invest in research, to have lecture series for our staff. These things make for a more exciting life for everybody. Do you have a minimum
to be an entrepreneur and I think there need to be entrepreneurial freedoms in order to flourish in the world market. I hope there will be open borders as much as possible in all directions, in terms of trade and talent. Of course there's no guarantee that such a policy will be used in the way I would wish it to be used, but there's a chance, and within the EU there was less chance.” Would you like to grow ZHA in terms of numbers of employees?
I would be happy to grow, because I see the advantage of
budget when considering which projects to take on?
We’re competitive with our fees but we can’t compete with very run-of-the-mill firms or ideas that are just pulled out of a drawer. Sometimes we’re willing to take a loss on a job if we find an opportunity that is intellectually interesting. Particular small projects usually apply a loss, but we're willing to do them because of the prominence of the site or the motivation for the staff – like the Serpentine Sackler Gallery [in London, UK] for instance. We take a loss on many small projects, happily. But we can’t on big projects.
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