Amanda Mitchison in The Telegraph:
Zaha Hadid, visionary exponent of the crash-landed-and-about-to-explode look in modern architecture and the woman charged with creating an aquatics centre in east London for the 2012 Olympics, has her main offices in a perfectly solid, old, red-brick converted school in Clerkenwell, central London. The surroundings are rather stark: white walls, rows of black files and a series of long tables where her employees – young, thin, brisk worker-bee architects dressed in black – sit behind their laptops.
In contrast Hadid herself, who is also completely clad in black, is large and voluptuous. She regularly works late into the night, her hair looks ruffled and her big, liquid eyes are heavy-lidded. The impression that she has just got out of bed is echoed by the fact that she is wearing a ring decorated with something that looks like a huge diamond-encrusted bedspring.
Wrapped around her torso is an extraordinary garment: a sort of jagged-edged little black duvet with sleeves. Hadid has always dressed adventurously. She once wrote that every garment ‘should be a statement that either questions its form, structure or materiality. I often put on a jacket or a cape upside-down as a means of understanding it in a new way.’
More here.
