Zaha Hadid’s aggressive performance on Today confirms why architecture would be better off without her

Zaha Hadid is the most famous woman architect in the world. Would women, or, indeed, architecture, be better off without her pushily hard-won, global celebrity?

She established her studio in London in 1980. For nearly fifteen years Hadid, absurdly, became famous for not actually having built anything. Instead, her reputation was boosted by a clique of fawning admirers who saw in her uncompromising angles and, later, zoomorphic blobs a fearless repudiation of stuffy tradition.

The competition entry for Cardiff Opera House was her celebrated cause. This, with genius, managed to alienate both the left and the right. The former thought it elitist, the latter outrageous. It was, after years of well-publicised struggle, abandoned in 1995. She became a martyr to taste and sexism.

At about the same time, Hadid’s first real building emerged above the ground. This was a tiny fire-station in a Swiss-German furniture factory whose shrieking concrete angles and disruptive interiors photographed very well and were dutifully recorded in the parish magazines of architecture, but were not much liked by the actual firemen.