Zaha Hadid

The world's best female architect is sought - after everywhere - except Britain. Why? 'I'm not part of that boys' network'. Lynn Barber meets the hugely talented Zaha Hadid
Zaha Hadid stands in front of the Cincinnati Center for Contemporary Art

Zaha Hadid is running late so she tells her PR to take me down the road to see her flat. I would hate to let a stranger poke around my home but Zaha's flat has all the intimacy of a car showroom so I suppose it doesn't matter. It is a bare white penthouse on top of a new block in Clerkenwell where she has lived for two-and-a-half years so presumably it represents her taste. It is extremely, dauntingly, hard. There are no curtains, carpets, cushions or upholstery of any kind. The furniture, if that's the right word, consists of slippery amorphous shapes made of reinforced fibreglass and painted with car paint. The PR keeps pointing at these strange blobs and saying, 'This is a recliner', 'This is a bench', 'This is a chest of drawers', and I keep wanting to hoot, 'You're having me on!' A typical moment comes when he points to three silver curved interlocking columns and tells me they are a tea set that Zaha designed for Alessi. How can they be, I wonder, when there is no teapot, milk jug, sugar bowl, or anything else associated with tea? 'This is the teapot,' he says, picking up one of the pillars, whereupon the other two promptly fall down.

Her bedroom is fractionally more inviting in that it does at least have a recognisable bed, a small oriental rug, and a table with all her jewellery and scent bottles laid out, but that's about it. Rooms are supposed to provide clues to personality, but this seems to be a statement of impersonality. What could you actually do in a flat like this? Where would you sit and read (there are no chairs, no books) or watch television (no television) or listen to music (no CD player, no CDs). Later I asked her, if she wanted to spend an evening reading, where would she sit? On the bed, she said.

After the tour of the flat, the PR summons her car - a truly fabulous extended BMW, which she was given as a present when she designed BMW's much-admired factory in Leipzig - and her chauffeur drives us back to her office, a converted school in Clerkenwell. Given the choice, I would far rather live in her car than her flat, because the car at least has comfortable seats. After a bit more waiting (she is running an hour late) at last I am summoned to meet Zaha at a huge white table in a huge white boardroom. She looks tired and distracted, reading texts on her mobile phone, and avoiding eye contact. She keeps flicking her hair and hitching her emerald satin jacket across her ample bosom - she gives the impression of being very uncomfortable in her own body. Almost immediately, she starts grumbling in a low, rapid growl about the boys' club that runs British architecture.

She is the top woman architect in the world, the only woman ever to win the Pritzker prize. She is hugely admired and sought-after everywhere - except seemingly in Britain where she has lived for over 30 years. She has built a small cancer centre in Scotland and is currently building the Glasgow Transport Museum but her only commission in England is the aquatic stadium for the Olympics that goes on site later this year. It seems insane that she is so neglected here. Is it because she is Iraqi-born, therefore still 'foreign' despite her British nationality? Or because she is a woman? Or because she is 'difficult'? (She is certainly difficult to understand because she talks a mile a minute in an almost incomprehensible accent.) But that has not stopped her winning commissions in the US, China, Abu Dhabi, Germany, Spain, Switzerland, in fact almost any country you care to name.

'People always ask me how come you haven't done much here, and I don't have an explanation,' she sighs. 'There are so many projects in the City, but we are never asked to design them. I don't know why. Do they think we are too wild? I don't know. I am not part of this boys' network so I have no idea.' Maybe because she's not good at talking to clients? 'Well I've never even got to that situation. I am not part of the brotherhood which is more to the point.' Brotherhood? Does she mean freemasonry? 'No, I don't think freemasonry but there are places men can go and women can't, like those gentlemen's clubs, or guys asking each other to play golf or go on a sailing trip. I think the main problem is that most of the work here is with private clients and it's up to them - it's their land after all. They can choose whom they want and they don't want me, it's very obvious. But I don't know why. They haven't told me what the problem is - I'm just baffled.' Does she think it's more to do with being a woman or being a foreigner? 'I think they're equal. I can't generalise.'

She was born in Baghdad in 1950, where her father was leader of the Iraqi Progressive Democratic Party. He had been educated in Britain and he sent his two sons and then Zaha, who was much younger, to boarding school in England. She decided to be an architect at 10 or 11. 'I'm not sure what got into me but I was fascinated by it even then. I used to draw a lot. And my father knew many architects, they used to come and visit us. If you think back, there was incredible development and new ideas in the Sixties - it was when they built Brasilia. And there was another issue too - in South America and the Middle East, architecture began to represent a new era, a new level of independence, a move away from colonialism to modernity. We had Gropius building the university campus - there was a lot going on.'

She did a maths degree at the American university in Beirut, then came to London at 22 to train at the Architectural Association. It was so radical or anarchic in those days that it didn't even teach building construction and she was one of a group of students who campaigned for a proper syllabus. When she graduated in 1977 her teacher and mentor Rem Koolhaas called her 'a planet in her own inimitable orbit' and she was immediately invited to teach at the AA. In 1983 when she had still not actually built anything, she won an international competition to build the Peak, a vast leisure centre in Hong Kong, against 538 entries and, with the £100,000 prize, set up her office in Clerkenwell. In the event, the Peak was cancelled because the developers went bankrupt, and the first building she built was a small factory fire station in Germany in 1993.

In 1995 she won an international competition, against 268 other architects, including Norman Foster, to build the Cardiff Bay Opera House. But there were local objections (Rhodri Morgan MP said the design was based on Mecca and might incite a fatwa!) and another competition was held. She won again. But somehow Cardiff managed to dump her design, and build the deeply mediocre Millennium Centre instead. Did she cry when she heard? 'No.' Doesn't she ever cry? 'Oh yes I do cry. Too much. But not about Cardiff. I didn't want to allow myself to be bitter or dwell on it because I made a conscious decision that I had to move on. But of course I was never allowed to forget it because for at least five years I couldn't walk anywhere without people talking about it, at airports, on the street. And mostly the Welsh. I thought, I wish all these people had sent letters. But they said, "Many of us did".' Has she seen the Millennium Centre that replaced her design? 'No. I'm sure it's fine. I don't really have any bitterness about Wales any more.'

But it meant that work dried up and it was difficult to sustain morale in her team. She even briefly thought of giving up architecture. 'But I look back now and think, Why did these people stay with me? Honestly, we were like a leper colony here after Cardiff, but most of them stuck with me. For about six years after Cardiff we had no work, and all the money I made was through teaching or lecturing or competitions.' But wasn't her family very rich? (I read that her brothers turned up for her degree show in Rolls Royces.) 'Well my father was a socialist, and although my family could support me they couldn't get money out of Iraq officially, and my father used to go by the book. Yes, of course, my family helped me, my brothers helped me, but after I set up my own office I had to really help myself. Some people seem to think I had an oil well in my garden! It's a nice idea but not true.'

Her practice really only took off in the Noughties, and she has still only built 10 buildings. But now she has 50 projects on the go, everywhere from China to Zaragoza, and employs 250 people. Is she a good employer of women? 'Well I think women should be encouraged and I have quite a few senior women here, but not 50:50. But the issue with women is that there is sometimes a break [for children] and I think if they want, they should do that - but in architecture it is difficult to go away and then come back because the continuity is broken. In America, it's not an issue - nobody considers not working in the States.'

In a way, I told her, she must be a doubtful role model for young women because she has risen to the very top of her profession, but seemingly at the cost of sacrificing her private life. 'No, no, I have not sacrificed my private life. It was not an issue for me. It wasn't a choice. I don't think one has to get married. Nor are you obliged to have children if you don't want them. I didn't think Oh dear, I can't have kids - it was never like that, it was not a sacrifice. If I had been with the right person and I'd had kids I'm sure I could have managed.' Supposing she'd fallen in love with a man who wanted her to be a traditional wife? 'That wouldn't happen. My generation were all careerists.' Even before she encountered the 'new' feminism of Germaine Greer and co in the Seventies, she had been familiar with arguments about women's rights in Iraq and there was never any question of her not having a career.

Was she beautiful as a young woman? 'I was always unusual-looking; I wouldn't say beautiful. People used to always treat me like I was a movie star - they still do - but I'm not.' Actually I would say she is far too big in every sense to be like a movie star, but she is very much like an opera star. She hates being called a diva, because she suspects (probably rightly) that it implies temperamental, but she certainly has a diva's huge presence, imperious manner, and dramatic wardrobe. She wears mainly Yohji Yamamoto and Issey Miyake and never throws anything away.

She no longer has family in Iraq - they left after the rise of Saddam and most of them are in Jordan now - and her friends from school and university are dispersed around the world. She has happy memories of her childhood in Iraq, and a journey her father took her on to see the Marsh Arabs and the Sumerian cities of the south but she would never go back - 'Iraq is not what you know, Baghdad is so changed'. In theory it would make sense for her to live in the States, where she has plenty of work, but London really is her home - the sadness for her is seeing all the new buildings going up and wondering why she's never asked to build them. Despite her extraordinary achievements, I came away feeling obscurely sorry for her and thinking how sad for her to have to go home alone to that awful bare comfortless flat.

· Zaha Hadid appears in Modern Muses, photos by Bryan Adams for BlackBerry, at the National Portrait Gallery, 13 Mar-15 Jun,

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