Thursday 19 November 2015

THE FIRST GREAT FEMALE ARCHITECT - Jonathan Meades on Zaha Hadid (2008)

Its with great disappointment that this article from the outset appears, in my view, to have a significant motive to address gender before architecture. I am not a fan of Zaha Hadid, nor of her work, but I would guess that the mulit-award winning designer would rather be hailed as a great architect due to the catalogue of work she has produced and not because she is a women, maybe I’m wrong? The title of the piece makes this rather obvious but unfortunately the author feels it is necessary to distastefully over emphasise his hidden agenda by capitalising “ARCHITECTURE IS DOMINATED by men”. I’m not disagreeing that architecture is overpopulated by male figures, however, like so many others the author should've just written an article solely addressing gender  issues within architecture and titled it accordingly.         

The general mood of the article attempts to flatter the architect but to say that Zaha is “the first architect to be blessed since Mies (van der Roche)” is a little audacious, I can only assume that within the eyes of Mr Meades the likes of Louis Kahn, Tadao Ando, Oscar Neimeyer, Peter Zumthor, are all right offs.

As for the dialog between Jonathan Meades and Zaha...it's honestly not worth my time. Dribble.

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