Last month, Dezeen — working in collaboration with Architizer — sat down with Norman Foster at Foster + Partners’ London office to discuss his memories of the late Zaha Hadid. What followed was an illuminating conversation about an individual Foster considered to be not only a great architect, but a close friend.
“Everybody knows that Zaha was a fantastic architect. And in a way, you never take that for granted, but it’s a given,” Foster says at the beginning of the video. “For me, Zaha was also a very dear friend.”
Foster does, however, have one “tremendous disappointment” in regard to Hadid. He states that he never had the opportunity to share with her an insight one of her “very special” clients had revealed to him recently.
Norman Foster was not just an admirer of the late Zaha Hadid, but a close personal friend, as well.
At a recent dinner party, Foster happened to run into the Russian property developer Vladislav Doronin, the owner of Capital Hill House, a 2011 Hadid building located in the Barvikha Forest near Moscow. Foster recounts that even then, several years after the house’s completion, Doronin could not contain his enthusiasm for the building.
He eagerly shared both early renderings of the house and photographs of the finished product in order to illustrate how far Hadid had exceeded his expectations for the project. “He was saying,” Foster explains, “‘Look! This is what she promised and what she delivered!’”
Computer visualization of Zaha Hadid’s Capital Hill House in Russia
Foster believes that this anecdote perfectly encapsulates Hadid’s greatness. He, too, was stunned to see just how well Hadid was able to realize her otherworldly ambition with Capital Hill House, the only private residence she completed in her long career. “It’s an extraordinary resolution of this futuristic image and the built reality,” he says. “Zaha, the futurist, dynamic architect of the future, was also delivering.”
Photographs of the finished product
This interview is just the first in a series of conversations with architects close to Hadid that Architizer will publish over the next few weeks. These interviews were carried out as part of a memorial video put together by Architizer and Dezeen that was screened at last month’s Architizer A+Awards in New York. Stay tuned for recollections from Patrik Schumacher, Richard Rogers and more.
Header image via The Superslice; all other images via Dezeen