Like Zaha herself, al-Shabibi fils had spent decades in the Iraqi diaspora during Saddam Hussein’s rule. A thin, scholarly, soft-spoken 68-year-old gentleman in wire-rimmed glasses, Sinan al-Shabibi, governor of the Central Bank of Iraq, approached Hadid, then 59: Would she consider designing the bank’s Baghdad headquarters?Īl-Shabibi was the son of a statesman who had known Hadid’s own statesman father, Mohammed Hadid-both from grand, cultured, aristocratic Iraqi families. Within all the Zaha brouhaha, however, there was a quiet, reflective moment. Like Evita or Liz or Beyoncé, Hadid was now Zaha. The opening-after nearly a decade in the works (Rome wasn’t built in a day)-was a high-wattage moment that cemented Hadid’s celebrity.
It was Anita Ekberg from La Dolce Vita all over again. So when the Iraqi-born Hadid stepped out of her limousine at a balmy museum opening in 2010-in a white off-the-shoulder tubular coat paired with sequin-spangled fingerless gloves and punky black boots-the paparazzi were waiting and ready. MAXXI, as it is called, was leveraging the architect’s celebrity to advertise her more-baroque-than-Bernini new museum off the ancient Via Flaminia. I n the fall of 2009, city buses rumbled through Rome plastered with close-ups of a windblown Zaha Hadid, promoting the opening of her National Museum of XXI Century Arts.
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