Luigi Prestinenza Puglisi defends Zaha Hadid's legacy against critics

Architecture critic Luigi Prestinenza Puglisi writes a tribute to Zaha Hadid, arguing that she was unfairly criticized for her formal excesses and refusal to conform to trends like sustainability or poverty aesthetics. He identifies three geniuses of the 1990s: Frank O. Gehry, Rem Koolhaas, and Zaha Hadid. While Gehry's work continues with variations on established themes and Koolhaas has reinvented himself, Hadid pursued a difficult path balancing her history with autopoietic experimentation. Puglisi claims that speaking well of Hadid became taboo in critical circles, similar to Daniel Libeskind and Massimiliano Fuksas. He asserts that Hadid's architecture focused solely on space, inspired by Malevich, constructivists, suprematists, Niemeyer, Baroque architecture, and Euclidean geometry, ignoring philosophers like Virilio, Derrida, Foucault, and others. Hadid died at 65, leaving her trajectory unfinished, akin to Frank Lloyd Wright who produced masterpieces in his nineties. Puglisi concludes that only the great make mistakes and that Hadid was the greatest female architect ever.