Nine months after the globetrotting Iraqi-born architect died suddenly from a heart attack in Miami, aged just 65, her dazzling early output of paintings and drawings – produced before her first building was completed in 1993 – has gone on show. Visitors to the Serpentine Sackler Gallery in London might have the same reaction. Whoosh factor … the Heydar Aliyev Centre in Baku, Azerbaijan. I loved her images, but I didn’t even try to understand what they meant.” They looked like futuristic treasures dug up from the ground, with all these crazy forms bending, twisting and warping. And she had this strange habit of burning the edges of her drawings. “She was an incredible creature, always dressed in spectacular layers of scarves and feathers and Perspex heels. “Even as a student, Zaha had a kind of mythological aura around her,” recalls the artist Madelon Vriesendorp, who taught Hadid in painting workshops at the AA in the 1970s, introducing her to a vibrant colour palette beyond the smudgy greys and browns she had favoured. But the bottles, Hadid later admitted, merely contained tap water: they were just a means of her assistants transporting it from the bar downstairs. If they used the same fizzy water, her acolytes hoped, it might give their work the same magic Zaha lustre. Students had watched in mystified awe as a steady supply of the bulbous green bottles were shuttled upstairs to the cramped third-floor studio, where recent graduate Zaha Hadid was busy conjuring a painting for an exhibition, a world of skewed perspectives and jagged forms making a bid for freedom. Not for drinking, but for mixing acrylic paints. F or a brief period at London’s Architectural Association in the 1980s, sparkling Perrier water was in vogue.

Zaha hadid design process