On Jonathan Meades 'Zaha Hadid: the first great female architect'

Once my physics teacher told me one thing I would remember for all my life: ‘Never use the words meaning of which you don’t know to seem smarter, you will end up being a fool’. I will confess from the very beginning: I don’t know anything about Zaha. I know nothing except that she is a starchitect, she is the first woman to receive a Pritzker Prize, she was born in Iraq, studied maths in Beirut and architecture in AA, she designs not just buildings but furniture and amazing shoes.

I have neither read Derrida to fully comprehend the theory of deconstruction behind her early ‘paper’ works, nor do I know sufficiently enough about the concepts of her latest designs.

So, following advice of my teacher I would not argue about quality or aesthetics of Hadid designs. I am way more interested in pidgin of architectural society mentioned by Jonathan Meades (by the way, I suppose he doesn’t exclude himself from it, taking in account his striking expressions weaved in the essay*).

‘The gulf between clumsy, approximate jargon and precise, virtuoso design is chasmic’ [well, even for my non-British ear it sounds quite clumsy http://www.zahahadidblog.com/movies/2007/07/03/video-interview-with-zaha-hadid]. However, isn’t it Zaha’s strategy to avoid annoying questions aimed to ‘jeopardise’ her concepts? She skilfully looses the main focus of the conversation with ‘syntactical mishaps’ confusing the opponent. Like a rabbit, trying to escape cunning fox, she circles in the woods of architectural jargon, leading the interviewer nowhere. She knows she will get away with use of the language because: a) her mother tongue is not English and the most importantly b) she is ZAHA. She worked hard and long for her name and now it is working for her.

Hadid is not just a successful architect; she is an extremely smart business woman. She has carefully created architectural ‘Zaha Brand’: mysterious world of foggy architectural terms, digital design extravaganza and non-explained concepts. Seems very illogical… But is it?, - she is a mathematician after all.

*Some curious terms from Meades:

Chutzpah - (pronounced /ˈxʊtspə/) is the quality of audacity, for good or for bad. The word derives from the Hebrew word ḥuṣpâ (חֻצְפָּה), meaning "insolence", "audacity", and "impertinence." The modern English usage of the word has taken on a wider spectrum of meaning, however, having been popularized through vernacular use, film, literature, and television (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chutzpah)

Esperanto - is the most widely spoken constructed international auxiliary language.[2] Its name derives from Doktoro Esperanto, the pseudonym under which L. L. Zamenhof published the first book detailing Esperanto, the Unua Libro, in 1887. The word esperanto means "one who hopes" in the language itself. Zamenhof's goal was to create an easy and flexible language that would serve as a universal second language to foster peace and international understanding (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto)

Pidgin - (pronounced /ˈpɪdʒən/) language is a simplified language that develops as a means of communication between two or more groups that do not have a language in common, in situations such as trade, or where both groups speak languages different to the language of the country in which they reside (but there is no common language between the groups) - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pidgin

Lingua franca - (from Latin, literally meaning Frankish language, see etymology under Sabir and Italian below) is a language systematically used to communicate between persons not sharing a mother tongue, in particular when it is a third language, distinct from both persons' mother tongues (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingua_franca)