Zaha Hadid had a vision that was unusually visible from early on, yet she was just getting started.
Architects are, as a rule, old. Architecture is the slowest art. Unlike the closely adjacent fields of mathematics and music, architecture resists prodigies. The body of knowledge required is so broad, and the pace of design and construction is so stately, that it takes a long time to find your way. Celebrated designers, from Louis Kahn to Frank Gehry, usually don’t build much until their late forties, and they—Gehry and such others before him such as I. M. Pei, Philip Johnson, and Frank Lloyd Wright—often work willfully into their ninth and tenth decades. That is why the death, at the age of sixty-five, of one of the field’s visionaries, Zaha Hadid, gives such pause: although her vision was unusually visible from early on, she may also have been, like many in her generation, just getting started.
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