Hadid – The Over-Rated Architect

Zaha Hadid gets a lot of buzz these days as architect of the future. But Witold Rybczynski thinks she’s over-rated. “The urbanism is slightly frightening—a vision of the city that appears unrelated to either human use or occupation. Brasilia on speed. Walter Gropius once said that an architect should be able to design a city or a teacup. Whatever the merits of such a dubious claim, even Gropius wouldn’t have suggested that teacups and cities were interchangeable. In Zaha’s world, they are.”