Many people have already written their recollections of Zaha Hadid who sadly died last week. My main memories of her are from the Architectural Association in the later 70s and 80s, before she really built anything and long before she became a world- celebrated architect. The AA at that time was a small and very intense world of its own, inhabiting three houses in Bedford Square, but with little relationship to the London architectural world outside. Instead, in a way rare in London at that time, it was genuinely international- with staff as well as students from all over the world, finding a home there as Zaha did herself. It might sound odd that it seemed like a kind of family rather than a School of Architecture, its relationships were intense and very particular: and this was what I think Zaha valued and participated in fully. She was a striking, beguiling and utterly stylish figure, along with being a strong and individual voice, and her successes when they came were the School's successes, supported all the way by the AA Chairman, Alvin Boyarsky.
Zaha Hadid and Alvin Boyarsky at the end of year exhibition at the AA, July 1980
Her work was exhibited in the AA several times: the drawings of the apartment conversion in Eaton Place filled the 18th century saloon of the Members' Room in 1982, and also won the top RIBA project award that year. The paintings representing that space are exhilarating and clearly show an architectural and spatial sense like no other, that many buildings over the later decades would show.
Zaha Hadid: 59 Eaton Place London: master bedroom and library 1982