Zaha Hadid: Everywhere else but here

Last weekend, Zaha Hadid was awarded a CBE for services to architecture. But will she ever be given a major commission in Britain? Jay Merrick meets one of the world's most intriguing architects

Zaha Hadid's personal assistant, Lucien, leaves you in no doubt about two things: stage management and awe for his employer. "Would you mind if I delayed your coffee until Zaha gets here?" Not at all. "Would you like an ice cream? Zaha has ice cream." Well, naturally, I'd love an ice cream. Add to these elements a shot of irony and a beauty with almost mystical origins in the Tigris, Euphrates and Nile rivers, and you have a picture of Zaha Hadid and her work.

The irony, of course, is that one of the world's most intriguing architectural talents was this week made a CBE, yet seven years ago, at the crucial early stage of her career, her bubble was burst. Having won the competition to design Cardiff's new opera house, the Welsh apparatchiks promptly set a trend that has tainted the country's major public works since then: they funked it, and cancelled it.

At the time, Hadid was on the verge of supernova. Virtually any competition she entered was highlighted in Architects Journal or Building Design & Construction. Her extraordinary visuals for a redevelopment in Hong Kong's exclusive Peak district were mind-blowing. Was this a freeze-frame in a multiple vortex of Morse code dots and dashes? And it was the same with her Cardiff Opera House proposal. One looked at the strange currents of images and wondered: yes, but what will the building actually look like?

It seemed impossible that Hadid could be stopped. But she was, and those Cardiff non-movers and shakers must feel a degree of shame. By ditching her, Welsh planners set a killing precedent, and not just in Wales: gifted young architects weren't going to get major urban projects. But the young woman they shunned is, today, red hot. She's masterplanning in Singapore; designing a BMW complex in Leipzig, in which the car lines pass through admin offices; electrifying Rome with an arts centre that is both Piranesian and, weirdly, apparently as malleable as Playdough; and delivering a ski-jump in Innsbruck that reinvents the arc.

Hadid has become an obvious force in world architecture. Her force, though, was not originally perceived as obvious because of the language that was, and is, her key tool: her drawing. It was, initially, too occult – admired within architecture, but nerve-wracking outside it. "In the late Seventies, when there was a lot of re-questioning of certain theories and ideologies, drawing became very important to many architects," she said this week. "It became very clear in my fourth year at the Architectural Association that unless one reinvented ways of representation, you were going to repeat and repeat. It became obvious that traditional methods were not appropriate for developing three-dimensional architecture and repertoires.

"Ultimately, architecture should change or improve how we live. It's about formal and social repertoires, and I think that if we can, through spatial experimentation and experience, change how we think of things, I think that's ultimately it. Whether it's achievable is another story."

When Hadid was a student she was taught – and duly "shattered" – by Rem Koolhaas, among others. "That atmosphere. And the rise of the historicists, and the seeming momentum gained by them made some of us revolutionary. We rediscovered that public space was not about one public space but about a field of public spaces; that porosity of site is very critical."

It seemed achievable. Looking out at New York for the first time, seeing the Maison du Verre and Los Angeles, it came to her that architecture was "not only just buildings, but a whole city condition. You know, going to Moscow, seeing all this stuff; going to China, going to Brazil and seeing the Oscar Niemeyer buildings."

The idea was to make a new world. "There was cultural change," she says. "It was predicted in the early Eighties. Puritanism versus hedonism. It couldn't be done through renovation, but had to be done through new programmes, new ideas about living and working. There shouldn't be this wariness about unacheivable stuff. The problem here is that most of the projects are commercially guided. That does not mean they couldn't be really exciting. The sites they sit on should not be private domain, but public domain. Which means they could be public spaces, event spaces, where there are galleries or restaurants or where people could rest."

Hadid speaks of urban geometries, but what she really invokes are open, porous sites rather than "fortifications" with little or no casual public penetration: "Great spaces are not only great spatially, but everybody can access them. There is no key and there is no fee to go into these spaces. People need a better quality of space. And using the ideas of topography and landscape is a way of dealing with very large programmes." She dreams, for example, of a reconfigured tranche of the City of London, stretching from High Holborn to the Tower of London; and she may get a chance to strut her stuff, having just been shortlisted to recast Bishopsgate.

If she does, we will see a multifarious solution because Hadid is obsessed with the interrelationships of fragmentary evidence: time, boundaries, history, and whatever topics happen to be at hand – "quarrying, topography, nails, or whatever". In the past four years, rock formations and erosion have particularly fascinated her, as her design of a stunningly tectonic hotel in Guadalajara, Mexico, testifies.

She denies that she will ever be a "signature" architect with repetitive buildings for corporate clients but, rather engagingly, admits that "we have to carry our own repertoire with us. But over a period it changes drastically. You know, we do 2,000 drawings of everything, but after 2,000 drawings there is always still something you can't get. There's always an element of surprise." Any architect who refers to "the transparency of concrete" is clearly into surprises.

Ultimately, though, Hadid's process to architectural genesis is elemental and long-standing, and goes some way to explaining her trademark of flowing and interlocking forms. "In the Rome projects we refer to the volumes as streams, the minor streams and the major streams," she says. "It's because rivers are like that.

"There's a timelessness about water that's very interesting. When I was a kid I was in Iraq, in Baghdad, and once I went to Egypt. And there was a similarity between standing by the Nile and the Tigris and the Euphrates because those rivers had flowed more or less in the same places for many many years. And that was a very moving experience for me. Fluidity gives you this kind of timelessness. In terms of one's personal experience in this space, it's no longer linear, it's not marked by walls or entries, you flow and you come back and you flow again."

Her CBE indicates that Zaha Hadid has won the approval of the British establishment. Who, though, will erase the irony of this honour by awarding her a significant commission? Who will allow her to flow freely on British soil?