As Zaha Hadid, the world’s most acclaimed woman architect, sits down at a table under the four-pane skylight of her East London apartment, a shaft of sunlight splits the grey, rain-heavy sky and illuminates the white space around her. The resultant natural spotlight is something with which this notable designer is clearly both comfortable and familiar.

Hadid, 57, is renowned for the “impossible” shapes of her buildings, for the sweeping organic forms and trapezoidal lines that make them appear truly futuristic. The list of her projects, awards and accolades is almost too long to digest, but a heavily edited version highlights the 2004 Pritzker Architecture Prize (of which she was the first female recipient); her design for the Aquatic Centre, which will be a feature of the 2012 London Olympics; the new Guggenheim Hermitage Museum in the Lithuanian capital Vilnius, and, last but not least, the set for the Pet Shop Boys’ 1999 world tour and a snow and ice installation in Lapland, both of which went beyond the architect’s usual brief. There is an equally impressive inventory of furniture, paintings and objects for companies such as Vitra and Alessi.

But what inspired Hadid’s interest in architecture? “When I was seven I went with my parents to Beirut to see some new furniture that they had ordered for our home,” she recalls. “My father, Mohammad Hadid, was a forward-looking man with cosmopolitan interests, and in those days, Baghdad, where I was born and where we lived at the time, was undergoing a Modernist influence; the architects Frank Lloyd Wright and Gio Ponti both designed buildings there.

“I can still remember going to the furniture maker’s studio and seeing our new furniture. The style was angular and modernist, finished in a chartreuse colour, and for my room there was an asymmetric mirror. I was thrilled by the mirror and it started my love of asymmetry. When we got home, I reorganised my room. It went from being a little girl’s room to a teenager’s. My cousin liked what I had done and asked me to do hers, then my aunt asked me to design her bedroom, and so it started. But it was my parents who gave me the confidence to do these things.”

Having trained at the Architectural Association in Bedford Square, London, in the Seventies, Hadid’s initial approach to the creative

process was to put pen to paper. “I love to draw, and although we work on computers in the studio, I still like to see paper relief models of my projects. I also delight in the actual movement of putting pen to paper; the way watercolour or ink flows over the surface.”

Flowing is a word that can also be used to describe Hadid’s thought processes. “When I was drawing and working on ideas for the Olympic Aquatic Centre, I created a shape that supports the roof of the building. From that came an idea for a table, now called the Aqua table. It has a laminated polyurethane resin base and a tactile, non-slip silicon-gel top, which lends stability to the uneven upper surface. Some people didn’t like the feel of the silicon, so I designed a series of Perspex mats that rest on top.” The Aqua table was produced in a limited edition of 24, while the prototype is in Hadid’s apartment, where it has seated as many as 18 dinner guests.

Behind the table, occupying the full width of the wall, is a painting that Hadid made in 1977, a copy of her fourth-year student project. Entitled Malevich’s Tektonik, it illustrates a design for the redevelopment of Hungerford Bridge over the River Thames, but her inspiration is the work of the Russian artist Kazimir Malevich.

“Before coming to London I studied mathematics at the American University in Beirut, where I became interested in geometry. It’s the mathematics of the Arab world and I am fascinated by the mix of logic and the abstract. The Russian Avant Garde movement of the Twenties, the work of Malevich and Kandinsky, brings this together and injects the idea of motion and energy into architecture, giving a feeling of flow and movement in space.”

As well as paper, Hadid cites plastic as an inspirational material. “Plastic started a new generation of ideas and possibilities; it could be moulded into myriad shapes and was easy to mass-produce. I especially admire the Verner Panton chair for its fluid form and use of this material.” At her architectural offices, the meeting rooms are furnished with orange, purple and yellow Panton chairs, and her painting, Homage to the Panton Chair, was her personal tribute to the Danish designer’s work.

The use of glass and transparent materials also features in Hadid’s buildings, but her own collection of glass objects is unexpectedly colourful. Arranged on top of a clear glass table and on the floor around it is an array of Fifties and Sixties Italian, Scandinavian and Bohemian glass. “I used to go to Church Street in West London to search for them; some are presents from friends,” she says. The vibrant, erratically shaped bowls and vases have something in common with her buildings in that their flowing arcs and organic shapes allow the onlooker to look through as well as around them.

For one of her most recent projects, Hadid worked with Swarovski crystal to create the Ray chandelier, which will be unveiled this week at the Swarovski Crystal Palace in Milan. “It’s made from tensile cables that stretch from floor to ceiling at a 45 degree angle in the form of a fluted cone, and it carries 2,700 crystals, each individually illuminated by an LED light,” she says with a sweeping gesture of her arm that belies the scale of the piece. It is yet another formidable work that will once again put Zaha Hadid in the spotlight, but this time one of her own making.

Ray by Zaha Hadid for Swarovski Crystal Palace is exhibited at Via Savona 56, Milan, until April 21 (www.swarovskicrystalpalace.com). The Aqua table is sold by Established & Sons (020-7968 2040)

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