Zaha Hadid, the first woman to win the RIBA Gold Medal, used her acceptance speech to explain how architecture must 'contribute to society’s progress and ultimately to our individual and collective wellbeing' / Sophie Mutevelian

Speaking during her RIBA Royal Gold Medal lecture in London, British architect Zaha Hadid claimed that unlike artists, architects have a duty to the community's wellbeing and should not dwell on “contemplation, expression or provocation” in their work.

“For me there was never any doubt that architecture must contribute to society’s progress and ultimately to our individual and collective wellbeing,” she said. “It performs and facilitates everyday life.”

Hadid added that many people misinterpret her readily identifiable designs “as striving for individual expression” and of being “self-indulgent or wilful” when her real aim is to move architecture forward.

“I have always believed in progress and in creativity’s role in progress,” she said. “That’s why I remain critical of any traditionalism.

“My career can best be made sense of in terms of addressing an important historical process: the process of the intensification and re-urbanisation of social life in the city.”

Hadid claimed the current urban renaissance is very different from those that have gone before, due to the “new interaction density and complexity of urban life.”

She said: “Buildings and programmes need to break open and embrace each other, even interpenetrate. This requires the spatial complexity and openness.

“This is the meaning of my first compositional strategies: explosion and fragmentation. The Russian avant-garde offered me a reservoir of yet untested compositional innovations, full of complexity and dynamism.

“I added to this the ideas of distortion and gradient transformation, for the sake of site adaptation and versatility and I explored the use of free form curvature to articulate the dynamism and fluidity of contemporary life.”

Hadid closed her speech by reflecting on the role of the public domain in 21st century architecture.

“I was always intrigued by the modernist de-fortification of sites and the lifting of buildings to let the public space flow, but this time with an intense programmatic activation,” she said. “My interest in long-span structures and cantilevers follows from this idea of anti-fortification.

“Structural sophistication and boldness is also required to carve out interconnected communicative voids where space extends in layers above, below and all around. Most of my projects – public and private – aspire to this life-enhancing increase in connectivity.”

Given in recognition of a lifetime’s work, the Royal Gold Medal was established in 1848 and is presented every year by the Royal Institute of British Architects to an architect or architects who have had a significant influence “either directly or indirectly on the advancement of architecture”.

Hadid is the first woman to win the prize in her own right in its history.

RIBA President and chair of the selection committee, Jane Duncan, said: “Zaha Hadid is a formidable and globally-influential force in architecture. Highly experimental, rigorous and exacting, her work from buildings to furniture, footwear and cars, is quite rightly revered and desired by brands and people all around the world.”

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