It was in 1988, at London’s Tate Gallery during the Deconstructivism conference held in anticipation of MoMA’s eponymous exhibition that I first encountered Zaha Hadid in person. She was lecturing among her six co-exhibitors: Peter Eisenman, Rem Koolhaas, Frank Gehry, Wolf Prix, Bernard Tschumi, and Daniel Libeskind. I had encountered her work a few years earlier as a young architecture student (at Stuttgart University) and was stunned and thrilled by the unprecedented degrees of compositional freedom, versatility and dynamism in her work. Up until then I had not been so sure if architecture was such a good career choice for me. I was rather underwhelmed and bored by architecture but, through my encounter with Zaha’s incredible work, architectural design unexpectedly transformed into an adventure. The bounds of architectural possibilities had shifted. Thirty years later, this sense of adventure continues. Zaha changed our field and changed everything for me.
At the 1988 conference I was also struck by Zaha’s genuine openness in comparison to the pretentious demeanor of the other (male!) protagonists. They were showing off, whereas she showed what she was trying to do. This was my impression, anyway. It was clear to me that these architects represented the most significant new tendency within architecture at the time, and Zaha seemed the most forceful and the most approachable of this group. She was also the youngest of them. At that time I was an exchange student studying in London and expected to return to Stuttgart that year to continue my studies. I changed my plans and joined Zaha’s studio instead. When I was hired we were only four or five people working in a single room: Studio 9 at No. 10 Bowling Green Lane, where she had set up her first proper office three years earlier.
She had hired some of her former students and the office would temporarily swell with additional ex-students who would come in to help us during competition deadlines. At that time our work was mostly competitions and exhibitions, although we also worked on the Berlin IBA project and two small Tokyo projects in a stop and go fashion.
