Creating controversy

Now she is about to throw a challenge down to North Oxford, with her designs for a university site in the city's most affluent and refined suburb.

In the view of some, Woodstock Road, traditionally the home of dons and senior university members, is given its intellectual and cultural atmosphere as much by its large Victorian and neo-Gothic buildings as its academic residents.

But the traditional and the ultra modern could soon be brought together in radical fashion by the world's most famous woman architect.

Widely credited with rewriting the rules of architecture, Hadid could soon be making a contribution to the first chapter in the story of 21st-century architecture in Oxford.

As reported in last week's The Oxford Times, the Baghdad-born architect was invited to design the university's new Middle East Centre in Woodstock Road, with a Victorian mock Tudor house on one side and Edwardian building on the other.

An exhibition was held at the weekend to display her plans for a white fibreglass concave structure, which appears to be as much a piece of modern sculpture as a university building, housing a library and lecture theatre.

The Middle East Centre, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary, is part of St Antony's College and trains postgraduates in international studies.

It was a gift from an unnamed benefactor that has allowed the centre to mark the birthday with a new building beside its cramped existing home.

The decision to ask Hadid to design a building, set back from the leafy frontage of Woodstock Road, was certainly a bold one.

While she has enjoyed tremendous success in Europe and America, so far in the UK, her adopted country, there has only been a cancer care centre, opened by Gordon Brown at Kirkcaldy in Scotland.

In the past Hadid has faced criticism as a "paper architect" whose designs have been viewed as too radical and untested to risk in British cities.

Notoriously, her dramatic competition-winning £85m design for Cardiff Bay Opera House was scuppered and left unbuilt after local protests that it was elitist, impractical, irrelevant and too much for a rundown city.

Her plans for Woodstock Road should certainly give her the chance to prove that her complex brand of architecture can work on a practical level.

She has been faced with creating a new building in a very limited space, with the need to preserve mature trees creating further restrictions.

The Middle East Centre is delighted with the concave-shaped building that she has produced.

It is white, made of fibreglass, with a timber structure and resembles an elongated tunnel.

Into it, she has managed to create four levels, one underground, with a main library reading room on the first floor and daylight entering through a series of engineered skylights.

The basement will house the main archive storage area and new state-of-the-art lecture hall.

Dr Eugen Rogan, director of the Middle East Centre, said: "I have long had a dream of seeing Zaha involved in a project here. She is undoubtedly one of the most influential architects at work today. I think she has given Oxford its first listed building of the 21st century."

St Antony's say they want the city to be widely used by the general public, who who will be able to attend public lectures to learn about events and issues in the Middle East.

It emerges that the centre was always going to have a special appeal for the architect, whose father Mohammed Hadid was a leading Iraqi statesman and a leader of Iraq's Progressive Democratic Parties.

When her brother, Foulath, came to Oxford to edit their father's memoirs, he became a member of St Antony's and the Middle East Centre.

Three years ago she made a powerful impression after delivering a memorial lecture at the centre, speaking on the 'New Complexities of Civic Space'.

Dr Rogan believes in some ways she epitomises what the centre itself stands for.

"Zaha is a bridging figure between the Middle East and the western world, She is a British architect, Baghdad-born, who studied at the American University of Beirut."

The bridging metaphor can be extended to the new building, to be known as the Softbridge Building, which will link 66 and 68 Woodstock Road.

But Peter Howell, secretary of the Victorian Group of the Oxfordshire Architectural and Historical Society, strongly opposes such an approach.

"The Victorian group has been going for 40 yeas and we have always said that the gaps between houses in conservation areas are as important as the houses themselves. I am pleased that we have been supported in this important principle by planning inspectors.

"The college has gone to a distinguished architect and I think it is a clever design. But in many ways she was a curious choice for a site in one of the most important Victorian suburbs in the country. Her work has tended to be on open sites.

"By going for a design that is so completely different, it is inevitable that they will run into the argument that it is not in keeping with the surrounding area. They could have gone for some form of pastiche, although it is extremely difficult to get pastiche right."

"We have not yet had the chance to discuss the plan. But I cannot see the Victorian Group being in a rush to welcome it," added Mr Howell. "I am also unhappy that the building rises so high on the south side."

Tony Joyce, chairman of Oxford Civic Society, another visitor to the exhibition last weekend, said: "It is a very interesting modern design on a difficult and restrictive site. But in my view the suitability of the design in relation to the existing buildings on Woodstock Road is very questionable.

"When seen from inside the college the new building is even more overpowering on the existing buildings than it appears from Woodstock Road."

But Dr Rogan emphasises it would be well back from the leafy frontage of Woodstock Road, while the neighbouring buildings would tower over the new structure.

He said the centre has now far outgrown the Victorian house in Woodstock Road, with lecture rooms full to bursting for popular speakers and book cases having to be pushed against front windows.

"It should be seen as an opportunity to preserve the Victorian building," he said. "We love this building. What is being proposed will remove some of the stress and strain on it.

"For some people the shock of change is off-putting. If you think of Keble College, it is now regarded as a venerable, beautiful old building, but it had been seen as a monstrosity."

He believes that trying to replicate a mock Tudor Victorian house would have been a huge mistake. "In any case we are dealing with a part of Oxford where there is a wide range of architecture from Victorian to the Hilda Besse Building, built in the 1970s."

Looking down at the model of the new building, he describes it as classic Zaha Hadid, showing her famed preference for rounded space to conventional walls.

For whatever Hadid attempts is simply unlike anything seen before, whether it is designing the stage set for the Pet Shop Boys, the Mind Zone in the Millennium Dome, or the Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati.

The same bold approach was even to the fore when she created the BMW factory in Leipzig. For this nerve centre for the car manufacturer's factory complex, she integrated a conveyor-belt so that the 5,000 employees could see the unfinished cars circulating the building while they were walking to their office or having a coffee.

She is now in the process of creating the 2012 Olympic Aquatics centre in East London, a project that has already been embroiled in the row over the escalating costs of the games.

"As a woman, I'm expected to want everything to be nice and to be nice myself," she once observed. "A very English thing. I don't design nice buildings. I don't like them. I like architecture to have some raw, vital, earthy quality."

But it would not be a Hadid project without some controversy. After all, for most of her life she has been breaking down barriers - between male and female architects, the Arab world and the west, the functional and the futuristic.

Even if it fails to produce harmony, her name alone would transform the Middle East Centre into a new North Oxford landmark.