Lunch With the FT: 52 Classic Interviews Read Online Free PDF

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I noticed that. Up with Auden.’
    It was, as I now see, the declaration of a life fulfilled: proving that good light verse has a place with good heavy verse in our lives.
    Eventually we departed the Café Royal, in a moderately straight line; and when I saluted him on to a bus home, Gavin Ewart had the aura of a very happy traveller.



18 NOVEMBER 1995

Zaha Hadid
Harnessing a global vision
    The architect was a controversial choice to design the Cardiff Bay opera house
    By Lucy Kellaway
    In the rag-rolled and marbled interior of Aubergine, a French restaurant in Fulham, the Iraqi architect Zaha Hadid looked all wrong. Too large for one thing and too flamboyant in a brilliant-lime-green pleated silk housecoat with a gash of crimson lipstick.
    This woman is the queen of avant-garde architecture. For over a decade she has travelled the world winning competitions with her far-out, asymmetrical creations. Last year she beat nearly 300 architects in a contest for the Cardiff Bay opera house, submitting a design that has variously been described as a row of jewels, a freeze-framed explosion and a deconstructed pigsty.
    But unlike her other work – most of which has never been built – the opera house may actually become a reality if the Millennium Fund decides during the next few weeks to pay £50m towards it.
    ‘I like more funky restaurants,’ she said in a husky voice, lighting the first of many cigarettes. I asked what she thought of the decor. ‘It’s not terrible, but I find it too fussy.’ This was an understatement, judging by the look on her face.
    Hadid knows something about restaurants, having recently designed one in Sapporo, Japan. ‘The theme was ice and fire,’ she said. ‘Monochromic. The ground floor is ice, with one enormous sheet of glass suspended very low. Upstairs is the fire, with rubber sofas and fibre-glass – it is as though a tornado had started in the bar and hit the ceiling.’
    ‘I see,’ I said, although I didn’t quite. A waiter minced up to our table. ‘ ’Ello leddies, I leet you ’ave a look at ze luncheon menoo,’ he said.
    Hadid exhaled slowly. ‘I really don’t understand a thing they say,’ she said with the easy irreverence of one naughty schoolgirl to another. ‘I don’t find this French accent in English at all charming. It is like watching Peter Sellers. I mean! Send them to elocution classes!’ She gave an eruption of a laugh.
    She had chosen Aubergine because some friends had praised the food, yet so far so bad. Still, she brightened up on seeing a soup on the menu called ‘cappuccino’, and earned the unwanted approval of the waiter by choosing it. ‘C’est la grande spécialité, madame,’ he said.
    Hadid rattled off the names of London restaurants that she did consider funky, though even these were not entirely to her liking as the service was poor. ‘The problem in this country is that unless you go to the very top, you get terrible service. You really notice when you land in Switzerland. In America the service is more casual but they do accommodate you.’
    This was the beginning of what turned out to be a global lunch. Even the most casual remark led to a comparison with foreign countries and cities, and in the course of one meal she mentioned Shanghai, Beijing, Japan, Hong Kong, Brazil, Vienna, Paris, Singapore, Tunis, Berlin, Switzerland, New York, Wales and, of course, Iraq.
    It is most unlikely that she was trying to impress with this geographical name-dropping; instead the relentlessly international bent seems to have become part of her personality. Brought up in Baghdad, she went briefly to a minor girls’ boarding school in England, lives in London but spends much time in New York, and is now working in both Vienna and Berlin. ‘I fly twice a week and I am a doggy,’ she complained. ‘Finished.’
    A waiter brought a dainty little
amuse-gueule
with a quail’s egg on top, and placed it carefully in front of us. ‘Bon