Zaha Hadid takes China

Zaha Hadid is giving a talk to a large audience in China, but she is not happy with her podium. It’s shaped like an irregular diamond and the British architect eyes it sceptically. “Just for your information, when you design a podium, you have to give enough space for someone to lean on,” she says, adding drily she hopes her own firm did not design the object.

Then, an attack on flora – “The flower arrangements are very nice, but not for me, thank you.” The two bouquets by her side, done in conventional pyramidal style, seem almost to wither in shock. (Later, a couple of uniformed Chinese youths scamper on stage to remove the offending items from her gaze.)

It’s hard to disassociate Hadid’s flamboyant personality from her equally no-holds-barred architecture, especially when she’s speaking from within her latest creation – the £130 million granite marvel that is the new Guangzhou Opera House. Hadid’s futuristic, sometimes alienating architecture has its detractors, but it’s hard not to be impressed when you’re in the very womb of this building – a 1,800-seat auditorium whose undulating walls, floors, grooves and panels are painted gold and embedded with hundreds of tiny lights so they look like bubbles in a flute of champagne.  

From the outside, the opera house – which some say has replaced Sydney’s in originality and grandeur – looks like two pebbles (one larger, one small) emerging from the banks of the Pearl River that runs through China’s third-largest city. It represents, along with buildings such as the MAXII art museum in Rome and the upcoming London Aquatics Centre, Hadid’s obsession with working along topological contours so that structures pop up from the landscape like huge organic edifices.

At the same time, the interior is a dramatic, sweeping whorl of white, grey and black, all traditional concepts of shape, scale, scope, symmetry, colour, cosiness and rooms-neatly-divided-by-walls be damned. Needless to say, the technology is the best that money can buy, with acoustics paramount, so that being in an unevenly lined and fretted rehearsal room makes you feel you’re standing in a particularly well-insulated giant conch.
This is Hadid’s – or, more precisely, her firm Zaha Hadid Architects’ – first completed project in China. But the company is planning more. There are projects in Beijing and Shanghai, as well as the Innovation Tower in Hong Kong. The firm wants to design more cultural centre in Chengdu and Nanjing, and is angling for the jewel in the crown – the new premises for Beijing’s national museum.

No doubt about it, Zaha Hadid is now a formidable global brand, and all aspiring, fast-developing nations want a piece of the action. Elsewhere, Hadid’s armada of some 350 architects is busying itself with the Dongdaemun Design Park in Seoul, the Next Gene Architecture Museum in Taipei, a massive seven-tower luxury condo in Singapore called d’Leedon, and the Sheik Zayed Bridge in Abu Dhabi – just to name a few. Recently, there’s been news that Zaha Hadid Architects may axe a quarter of its staff due to disruptions in the Middle East market, but it looks like demand from the rest of the world will only intensify.

China, especially, appears hungry for her work. The nation doesn’t seem to care much, at this stage, that many of the splendid buildings it’s commissioning may be white elephants. (Most workers in Guangzhou have neither the money nor the inclination to attend a dystopian Akram Khan dance spectacle, such as was staged at the opera house at its official launch.) The country just wants famous people to design striking buildings to put it on the global cultural map. Herzog & de Meuron, Paul Andreu, Rem Koolhaas – it’s invited all these architects to treat it like a large playground, to better or worse effect.  

UK architects and engineers, in fact, are faring well in China. Sir Terry Farrell’s 100-storey Kingkey Financial Tower in Shenzhen, for instance, is the tallest skyscraper ever built by a British architect, and is more than a third higher than London’s Shard. Foster & Partners, meanwhile, was involved in Beijing Airport’s Terminal 3.

Back in her adopted home (she was born in Baghdad), Hadid will unveil her Riverside Museum in Glasgow soon. The irony, however, as the Guardian’s Jonathan Glancey points out, is that she had designed something rather like the Guangzhou Opera House, in the mid-1990s. It was meant for Cardiff, but nothing came of it.

No doubt there’s only so much mammoth, sinewy architecture one country can handle. Still, if Zaha Hadid is taking China, it’s also worth bearing in mind that China is taking Zaha Hadid. 

Picture credits by order of appearance:

1). Zaha Hadid, by Marco Grob
2). Main auditorium, by Virgile Simon Bertrand
3). Exterior of the Opera House by night, by Iwan Baan
4). Women Walk between the two 'pebbles', by Iwan Baan

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