// essays //
Fall 2006
The 360 Degree Architect
Sumaiya Ahmed
Zaha Hadid:
Thirty Years in Architecture
The Guggenheim Museum
June 3 through October 25, 2006
The Guggenheim Museum's retrospective exhibition "Zaha Hadid: Thirty Years in Architecture" displays paintings, drawings, photographs, models, and movie clips of this Pritzker Prize-winning architect's pieces. A student of renowned Dutch architect and theorist Rem Koolhaas, some of Zaha Hadid's best-known buildings include "The Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art" (1998) in Cincinnati, Ohio, "The Phaeno Science Center" (2005) in Wolfsburg, Germany, and "The Hoenheim-North Terminus and Car Park" (2001) in Strasbourg, France. Although I attended the exhibition in the company of my Arabic class, which was drawn to the show because of Hadid's Iraqi nationality, identity was not, in fact, a central factor in her work. Instead, as the retrospective brings to light, what primarily informs Hadid's architecture is the immediate environment that her buildings inhabit. By underlining specific details about the landscape, Hadid's work allows the viewer to appreciate the fusion between landscape and architecture more.
The consequences for Hadid are that her buildings' relationships with their environments take conceptual precedence over other concerns, such as spatial logic. Unlike the traditional graph paper used by most architects, Hadid uses a variety of artistic media like paint and sketches manipulated by a photocopier to represent her unique designs. Indeed, the draft paintings that comprise much of the show may suggest that Hadid is more of a painter than an architect by the way that she manipulates three-dimensional designs on a two-dimensional page. The paintings are stunning on their own, even without the knowledge that they are possible architectural projects. There are also examples of sketches that she dragged through a photocopier, allowing the machine to skew her lines. As Joseph Giovianni writes in his essay included in the exhibition catalogue, "In the Nature of Design Materials: The Instruments of Zaha Hadid's Vision," "[for Hadid] a machine acquired the gestural capacity of the hand." Hadid used tools "whose material logic helped her to invent an architecture that the T square and parallel ruler no longer controlled." She avoided "tools that were all about rule and measure. She did not design on graph paper. She used mediums so that they were liberating rather than controlling. She tended to the incommensurate."1 Because Hadid refuses to limit her designs to conventional representational modes—insisting on depicting buildings from all 360 degrees rather than adhering to one perspective—undertaking her projects poses a certain risk. The very boundless energy that Hadid's work embodies may be what prevents many of her projects from being built, for capturing something so ephemeral within the solidity and fixity of architecture seems almost an impossibility.
Though not necessarily practical, this energy is mesmerizing for the viewer. Generously arranged in the first room of the exhibition is "The Peak," a collection of draft paintings and a model for Hadid's design of a leisure club overlooking the bay of Hong Kong. This project earned Hadid a first-place prize in the Peak International Design Competition for Hong Kong. Particularly captivating is an acrylic draft painting on cartridge paper. Although the project was never built, the potential effects of the work in relation to the human senses are palpable from the draft painting alone. What excites the human senses is the rhythmic movement of Hadid's shapes and the unusual bird's-eye view, a perspective the human eye would not ordinarily have. Notable too, is Hadid's precision of line and color. As The New York Times writer Nicolai Oursoussoff points out, Hadid defined each surface of her building, the buildings that surround it, and the crevices of the mountaintop topography through different planes of color.2 These planes of color establish a moving rapport between her building, which she paints from several angles on the same canvas, and the environment. By establishing a dialogue of grays and greens between the leisure club, the other buildings, and the mountaintop, Hadid brings attention to various surfaces. The stretched rectangular shapes of the building seem to consult with the crevices and angular surface of the topography.
By providing an aerial view, Hadid allows study of the landscape as a whole. This bird's-eye view is key, suggesting that Hadid's architecture cannot be viewed independently from its environment. Additionally, Germano Celant, senior curator of Contemporary Art at the Guggenheim writes in his essay, "Zaha Hadid: Adventure in Architecture," that Hadid's choice of perspectives gives way to "an external, almost aerial view suggesting the disorienting perspective of maps and urbanistic charts," turning "the architect into a vagabond and nomad in the space he is supposed to design, inserting him in a correct constellation of solutions and figures."3 By refuting the solidity of architecture in a landscape, Hadid proposes an active, inquisitive relationship, with which people can explore the environment.
The table model of "The Peak" in Perspex and wood clarifies the leisure club's potential to evoke a relationship between the viewer and the environment. In molding the leisure club along the contours of the ground, Hadid's design makes the viewers conscious of their immediate, physical foundations. That consciousness heightens one's sensitivity to local features, such as striations in a certain part of the topography. One notices the striations precisely because the shape of Hadid's building directs the eye towards them. Additionally, the gray surface of the club mimics the subtle grays of the mountaintop. Far from taking ownership of the ground on which the work is to be built, Hadid's design reveals a more symbiotic approach and emphasizes the qualities of its surroundings.
Hadid's aim of informing people about their surroundings by encouraging attention to their details is clear in the acrylic draft paintings for "Grand Buildings, Trafalgar Square" (1985). In this unrealized proposal for a building in Trafalgar Square, Hadid takes into consideration the transient effects of time of day. On two adjoining, horizontally-oriented rectangular canvasses, Hadid paints the landscape and its buildings in a spectrum of colors that suggests different times of day. In the left—hand corner of the top canvas, it appears to be night: planes of dark blue, black, and greens gradually give way to yellows and grays that seem to cloak the sides of a building with a cupola and another building with a dome. The mosaic of beige planes at the top of the canvas resembles dawn. At the same time, Hadid reiterates the bird's-eye view, for the graphic squares seem to comprise a landscape viewed from an airplane window. Finally, the lower quadrant contains a mosaic of bright yellow that suggests midday. By paying attention to the way light falls upon certain elements of her buildings, Hadid brings the viewer's attention to the very unique relationship different areas of the environment share depending on the time of day. Hadid's architecture aspires to complement the capabilities of light. Just as light highlights details in a space, Hadid's architecture seeks to inform the viewer about local details by echoing them.
Perhaps the most poetic example of how Hadid encourages the viewer to notice characteristics of the natural environment is the Perspex and wood model for the ongoing project, "Maritime Terminal," under construction since 1999 in Salerno, Italy. The smooth texture of the building evokes the texture inside an oyster shell. The building's horizontality and the undulated form of the roof mimic the horizontality and movement of waves. In these ways, the particular texture, shape, and colors of her building serve to magnify the aspects of a maritime location. The roof's imitation of the ripples of the ocean conjures up the rhythm of the ocean itself. With the Maritime Terminal, Hadid inspires viewers to look outwards toward the ocean, as if the terminal owed its shape to its surroundings.
Hadid's architecture does not simply respond to and emphasize its natural environment. Her work also draws the viewer's attention to the social environment, as in her design for the BMW assembly plant, which was built in Leipzig, Germany in 2001-05. In the plant's multi-storied interior, Hadid merges the blue-collar assembly workers and the white-collar company management into one space. Hadid places the BMW car assembly lines above the company's various administrative spaces. This interactive design insures that all BMW workers will be aware of the physical production of their cars. Primarily, the assembly plant's architecture emphasizes human relations and challenges social hierarchies by encouraging interaction between workers involved in various stages of automobile production. Hadid thereby suggests the importance of combating class divisions through social awareness.
Hadid's architecture attunes viewers to their environments by echoing a landscape's colors, by manipulating shapes to take their cues from existing natural foundations, and by challenging familiar social organization. Hadid allows viewers to appreciate aspects of the world that they might otherwise miss by highlighting her viewers' immediate surroundings with attention to textures, light, and color. Additionally, in the BMW assembly plant, Hadid's design attempts to dissolve social barriers by challenging familiar social hierarchical organizations. The details in Hadid's designs draw the viewer's attention to the strong interconnection between her buildings and their natural, social, and architectural environments. In the busy urban environment of New York City, which we often fail to admire as we rush preoccupied from task to task, Hadid's insistence on the interconnection between buildings and their surroundings is a particularly compelling message.
1 Giovanni, Joseph. "In the Nature of Design Materials: The Instruments of Zaha Hadid's Vision." Zaha Hadid.Ed. Germano Celant and Mónica Ramírez-Montagut. New York: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 2006. 23-25.
2 Ouroussoff, Nicolai. "Zaha Hadid —— A Diva for the Digital Age." The New York Times 2 Jun. 2006, late ed., sec. E: 2.
3 Celant, Germano. "Zaha Hadid: Adventure in Architecture." Zaha Hadid. Ed. German Celant and Mónica Ramírez-Montagut. New York: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 2006. 17.
Thirty Years in Architecture
The Guggenheim Museum
June 3 through October 25, 2006
The Guggenheim Museum's retrospective exhibition "Zaha Hadid: Thirty Years in Architecture" displays paintings, drawings, photographs, models, and movie clips of this Pritzker Prize-winning architect's pieces. A student of renowned Dutch architect and theorist Rem Koolhaas, some of Zaha Hadid's best-known buildings include "The Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art" (1998) in Cincinnati, Ohio, "The Phaeno Science Center" (2005) in Wolfsburg, Germany, and "The Hoenheim-North Terminus and Car Park" (2001) in Strasbourg, France. Although I attended the exhibition in the company of my Arabic class, which was drawn to the show because of Hadid's Iraqi nationality, identity was not, in fact, a central factor in her work. Instead, as the retrospective brings to light, what primarily informs Hadid's architecture is the immediate environment that her buildings inhabit. By underlining specific details about the landscape, Hadid's work allows the viewer to appreciate the fusion between landscape and architecture more.
The consequences for Hadid are that her buildings' relationships with their environments take conceptual precedence over other concerns, such as spatial logic. Unlike the traditional graph paper used by most architects, Hadid uses a variety of artistic media like paint and sketches manipulated by a photocopier to represent her unique designs. Indeed, the draft paintings that comprise much of the show may suggest that Hadid is more of a painter than an architect by the way that she manipulates three-dimensional designs on a two-dimensional page. The paintings are stunning on their own, even without the knowledge that they are possible architectural projects. There are also examples of sketches that she dragged through a photocopier, allowing the machine to skew her lines. As Joseph Giovianni writes in his essay included in the exhibition catalogue, "In the Nature of Design Materials: The Instruments of Zaha Hadid's Vision," "[for Hadid] a machine acquired the gestural capacity of the hand." Hadid used tools "whose material logic helped her to invent an architecture that the T square and parallel ruler no longer controlled." She avoided "tools that were all about rule and measure. She did not design on graph paper. She used mediums so that they were liberating rather than controlling. She tended to the incommensurate."1 Because Hadid refuses to limit her designs to conventional representational modes—insisting on depicting buildings from all 360 degrees rather than adhering to one perspective—undertaking her projects poses a certain risk. The very boundless energy that Hadid's work embodies may be what prevents many of her projects from being built, for capturing something so ephemeral within the solidity and fixity of architecture seems almost an impossibility.
Though not necessarily practical, this energy is mesmerizing for the viewer. Generously arranged in the first room of the exhibition is "The Peak," a collection of draft paintings and a model for Hadid's design of a leisure club overlooking the bay of Hong Kong. This project earned Hadid a first-place prize in the Peak International Design Competition for Hong Kong. Particularly captivating is an acrylic draft painting on cartridge paper. Although the project was never built, the potential effects of the work in relation to the human senses are palpable from the draft painting alone. What excites the human senses is the rhythmic movement of Hadid's shapes and the unusual bird's-eye view, a perspective the human eye would not ordinarily have. Notable too, is Hadid's precision of line and color. As The New York Times writer Nicolai Oursoussoff points out, Hadid defined each surface of her building, the buildings that surround it, and the crevices of the mountaintop topography through different planes of color.2 These planes of color establish a moving rapport between her building, which she paints from several angles on the same canvas, and the environment. By establishing a dialogue of grays and greens between the leisure club, the other buildings, and the mountaintop, Hadid brings attention to various surfaces. The stretched rectangular shapes of the building seem to consult with the crevices and angular surface of the topography.
By providing an aerial view, Hadid allows study of the landscape as a whole. This bird's-eye view is key, suggesting that Hadid's architecture cannot be viewed independently from its environment. Additionally, Germano Celant, senior curator of Contemporary Art at the Guggenheim writes in his essay, "Zaha Hadid: Adventure in Architecture," that Hadid's choice of perspectives gives way to "an external, almost aerial view suggesting the disorienting perspective of maps and urbanistic charts," turning "the architect into a vagabond and nomad in the space he is supposed to design, inserting him in a correct constellation of solutions and figures."3 By refuting the solidity of architecture in a landscape, Hadid proposes an active, inquisitive relationship, with which people can explore the environment.
The table model of "The Peak" in Perspex and wood clarifies the leisure club's potential to evoke a relationship between the viewer and the environment. In molding the leisure club along the contours of the ground, Hadid's design makes the viewers conscious of their immediate, physical foundations. That consciousness heightens one's sensitivity to local features, such as striations in a certain part of the topography. One notices the striations precisely because the shape of Hadid's building directs the eye towards them. Additionally, the gray surface of the club mimics the subtle grays of the mountaintop. Far from taking ownership of the ground on which the work is to be built, Hadid's design reveals a more symbiotic approach and emphasizes the qualities of its surroundings.
Hadid's aim of informing people about their surroundings by encouraging attention to their details is clear in the acrylic draft paintings for "Grand Buildings, Trafalgar Square" (1985). In this unrealized proposal for a building in Trafalgar Square, Hadid takes into consideration the transient effects of time of day. On two adjoining, horizontally-oriented rectangular canvasses, Hadid paints the landscape and its buildings in a spectrum of colors that suggests different times of day. In the left—hand corner of the top canvas, it appears to be night: planes of dark blue, black, and greens gradually give way to yellows and grays that seem to cloak the sides of a building with a cupola and another building with a dome. The mosaic of beige planes at the top of the canvas resembles dawn. At the same time, Hadid reiterates the bird's-eye view, for the graphic squares seem to comprise a landscape viewed from an airplane window. Finally, the lower quadrant contains a mosaic of bright yellow that suggests midday. By paying attention to the way light falls upon certain elements of her buildings, Hadid brings the viewer's attention to the very unique relationship different areas of the environment share depending on the time of day. Hadid's architecture aspires to complement the capabilities of light. Just as light highlights details in a space, Hadid's architecture seeks to inform the viewer about local details by echoing them.
Perhaps the most poetic example of how Hadid encourages the viewer to notice characteristics of the natural environment is the Perspex and wood model for the ongoing project, "Maritime Terminal," under construction since 1999 in Salerno, Italy. The smooth texture of the building evokes the texture inside an oyster shell. The building's horizontality and the undulated form of the roof mimic the horizontality and movement of waves. In these ways, the particular texture, shape, and colors of her building serve to magnify the aspects of a maritime location. The roof's imitation of the ripples of the ocean conjures up the rhythm of the ocean itself. With the Maritime Terminal, Hadid inspires viewers to look outwards toward the ocean, as if the terminal owed its shape to its surroundings.
Hadid's architecture does not simply respond to and emphasize its natural environment. Her work also draws the viewer's attention to the social environment, as in her design for the BMW assembly plant, which was built in Leipzig, Germany in 2001-05. In the plant's multi-storied interior, Hadid merges the blue-collar assembly workers and the white-collar company management into one space. Hadid places the BMW car assembly lines above the company's various administrative spaces. This interactive design insures that all BMW workers will be aware of the physical production of their cars. Primarily, the assembly plant's architecture emphasizes human relations and challenges social hierarchies by encouraging interaction between workers involved in various stages of automobile production. Hadid thereby suggests the importance of combating class divisions through social awareness.
Hadid's architecture attunes viewers to their environments by echoing a landscape's colors, by manipulating shapes to take their cues from existing natural foundations, and by challenging familiar social organization. Hadid allows viewers to appreciate aspects of the world that they might otherwise miss by highlighting her viewers' immediate surroundings with attention to textures, light, and color. Additionally, in the BMW assembly plant, Hadid's design attempts to dissolve social barriers by challenging familiar social hierarchical organizations. The details in Hadid's designs draw the viewer's attention to the strong interconnection between her buildings and their natural, social, and architectural environments. In the busy urban environment of New York City, which we often fail to admire as we rush preoccupied from task to task, Hadid's insistence on the interconnection between buildings and their surroundings is a particularly compelling message.
1 Giovanni, Joseph. "In the Nature of Design Materials: The Instruments of Zaha Hadid's Vision." Zaha Hadid.Ed. Germano Celant and Mónica Ramírez-Montagut. New York: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 2006. 23-25.
2 Ouroussoff, Nicolai. "Zaha Hadid —— A Diva for the Digital Age." The New York Times 2 Jun. 2006, late ed., sec. E: 2.
3 Celant, Germano. "Zaha Hadid: Adventure in Architecture." Zaha Hadid. Ed. German Celant and Mónica Ramírez-Montagut. New York: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 2006. 17.
// SUMAIYA AHMED is a sophomore in Columbia College. She has been a writer, illustrator and photographer for the Spectator and The Blue and White. She plans to study Arabic and French.