Zaha Hadid's Penthouse: Gender, Creativity and "Biopolitics" in the Neoliberal Workplace

Abstract

This chapter studies and critically examines the practice space inside and outside Zaha Hadid’s penthouse apartment and discusses how her gender, the marketing of her creativity, and her designs can affect architecture’s starchitect “biopolitic.” It presents the story of Hadid’s penthouse in the context of Margaret Thatcher’s neoliberalism and refers to writings on the impact of neoliberalism generally, by Michel Foucault and Wendy Brown, to discuss how architectural production, at the corporate level, ties the body of the architect to an incessant drive for increased marketization through the concept of homo oeconomicus. The chapter argues that the economic man architects and economic woman architects who perform a singularly focused “masculinist” form of labor, where work is everything, need to be understood and challenged as idealist practice in the profession. The chapter urges architectural practitioners to value their self as enterprise, not the enterprise of their self.