"Three months later I visited her again, since I was working intensely on a project at the French Academy in Rome with an installation by Hadid in the garden of Villa Medici," Obrist continues.

"I realized that the same cab driver picked me up. When, some time afterward, I saw him for the third time at the wheel, I asked about this strange coincidence. He explained to me that Hadid had bought herself a cab that was only there for herself and her guests."

Art Forum also published a text by the artist and poet Etel Adnan. Obrist relates that when Hadid's Chanel Pavilion was relocated to the Institut de Monde Arab in 2011, the German fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld asked Obrist to put together an opening event. The curator asked three poets, including Adnan to write odes to Hadid.

"Zaha Hadid's entire oeuvre is an invitation to take a trip," Adnan wrote. "Hadid is a poet of forms and of the materials that give presence to these forms; one must admire them close up and from afar to discover, in this woman who built on solid rock, a permanent nostalgia for departure.

"Everything she made seems to always be the day before a departure, a permanent invitation to the imagination, and to the imaginary."

For more reflections on the life and work of the late Dame Hadid, check out these links:

• Impromptu Zaha Hadid retrospective planned for Venice Biennale
• ZHA after Zaha: Patrik Schumacher on Zaha and what's next for the firm, on Archinect Sessions #61
• “We just loved her”: Frank Gehry remembers Zaha Hadid
• "Dame Zaha Hadid was an inspirational woman, and the kind of architect one can only dream of being"