Hasta La Ideas

(Photo: Miles Aldridge)

You know that Zaha Hadid loves undulating curves, futuristic faucets, and glossy polymers usually reserved for next-generation Toyotas—only a few of the tools employed by the Pritzker Prize-winning architect in pioneering a fluid geometry that suggests El Lissitzky‘s summer home…on Neptune. But there’s more to Hadid than fiber-reinforced plastic and steel, as revealed in John Seabrook‘s profile, published in the December 24 & 28 double issue of The New Yorker. Here are five fun facts that caught our eye:

5. Hadid does not live in a shiny pod but in a “suprisingly conventional” space that is a five-minute walk from her firm’s London offices.

She owns the top floor of a non-descript building, where she lives alone (she has never been married). The entirely white space is filled with furniture and paintings, all of which she created. She is not a collector of the works of others, unless you count her clothes (they take up a huge closet, which was also designed by her office) and her jewelry, piled like pirate’s booty on a table in her dressing room. Apart from its contents, her living space is suprisingly conventional, which is the way Hadid likes it. “It’s not my project,” she once said.

4. Founded in 1980 with five employees, Zaha Hadid Architects today has a staff of more than 300 people, almost half of them under 30.

3. She’s not spacey. Seabrook notes that, “Hadid rarely uses the word ‘space’ in talking about her designs, preferring words like ‘energy’ and ‘field’ and ‘ground conditions.'”

2. Her fondness for the off-kilter was seeded by an asymmetric mirror in her childhood home in Baghdad (she hasn’t been back since 1980). “I was thrilled by that mirror,” she once told the London Times. “It started my love of asymmetry.”

1. She’s a night owl who loves to text message.

Aaron Betsky, the director of the Cincinnati Art Museum and a noted architectural critic, was once in the front row at a lecture Hadid was giving at Columbia University, when he started to realize that she was texting at the same time. He pointed this out to Hani Rashid, the New York-based architect he was sitting next to. Hadid stopped her lecture and barked, “Pay attention, Aaron!”

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We, along with lots of other news outlets, have been calling Santiago Calatrava‘s Chicago Spire deceased for about six months now, but maybe we’ll all turn out to be wrong. Despite this summer’s announcement that the developer was being sued for defaulting on loans, which seemed like it was possibly the final nail in the coffin, there’s been a return to the story we told you about back in late March, that the AFL-CIO was thinking of stepping in to save the project in order to get more of its members back to work on a stable, likely multi-year project. There’s nothing too exciting about this newer announcement, because at this point it’s just still more talking to see if a deal can be made, but there has been the release of the specific numbers involved. We’re still skeptical that this building will ever see the light of day, but who knows. Calatrava was just given the go ahead in Dallas, so maybe his luck is changing. Here are some of the details from the AP:

The loan would pay off the estimated $64 million loan made by Anglo Irish Bank and satisfy various liens to firms that have worked on the Spire, including one by a firm associated with architect Santiago Calatrava, who stopped working on the project, claiming the developer owed him more than $11 million.

Tom Villanova, president of the Chicago and Cook County Building and Construction Trades Council, said the money would come from an AFL-CIO pension fund and Union Life Insurance Co., and perhaps pension funds from various locals.

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