Review: Zaha Hadid
The Soloman R. Guggenheim Museum
June 3-October 25, 2006
By Lara Shihab-Eldin

Zaha Hadid is more than a “diva.” She is a prize-winning architect (she became the first woman recipient of the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 2004), and besides an architect, she is described as a radical, a pusher of boundaries, an experimenter, a teacher, and a researcher. Born in 1950, in a liberal, secular, and flourishing Iraq that is worlds away from the disintegration that characterizes the country today, Hadid was part of an intellectual Baghdad family, and cosmopolitanism characterized her early years. She attended convent schools in Baghdad and Switzerland, and graduated from the American University of Beirut with a degree in Mathematics, before enrolling in the Architectural Association of London in 1972. The AA in the 1970s was a bubble of architectural experimentation from which a conceptually rigorous deconstructive architecture emerged, both inspired by and breaking down the modernist architecture that characterized the first half of the century. Hadid was a seminal member of this group of architects working to redefine architectural discourse and practice, and she won the Diploma Prize in 1977. She joined her teachers Rem Koolhaus and Elia Zhengalis as a partner at OMA for several years before establishing her own firm. As a professor of architecture at some of the best architecture schools in Europe and the United States, Hadid’s design process continues to influence an emerging generation of architects, in addition to generating some of the most spatially dynamic architecture of our time.

The Guggenheim retrospective “Zaha Hadid” [thirty years in architecture] is essentially a chronology of what has made up the architectural process for this architect: paintings, physical models, and computer models. While it may not clarify the way these byproducts of architecture translate into built architecture, we can certainly appreciate the intensity and energy embodied in these points of departure while imagining the spatial exuberance of the buildings they generate.

The exhibition is divided by different media: paintings, physical models, and computer renderings, with evocative photographs of built projects, such as the Innsbruck Ski Jump, sometimes placed on walls near corresponding models and drawings. Within each of these media categories, the work is presented in rough chronological order, spiraling up the rotunda of the Museum. This division by media: painting, physical models, and computer renderings, reflects the primacy of the design media, the "residue" of the architectural process in Hadid's work. The division of these design byproducts into distinct categories enhances our engagement with her work as art, but obscures our understanding of the projects themselves, as well as the way multiple media (painting, sketching, physical and computer modeling) collectively generate a particular project. The viewer encounters a particular project in a fragmented way that is slightly stilted, and that ironically fails to emphasize the revolutionary generative function of the specific media in Hadid's work.

Paintings

The order in which the media appear reflects the general chronology of their importance to Hadid’s work, with painting first. A full-size reproduction of her painting, Malevich’s Tektonik, (London 1976-77) is presented as the starting point of her oeuvre. This painting was Hadid’s final project in school, and it transforms the painter’s basic geometries into a very abstract hotel on the Hungerford Bridge on the River Thames. In an interview, Hadid describes that she was attempting to appropriate the moving quality of elemental forms in Malevichs’ paintings in order to inject the idea of motion and energy in architecture, and thus “free the plan” from its static role.

Most of her subsequent paintings appear stylistically different, more forceful and energetic, perhaps because she truly breaks “free” from the plan, and layers multiple perspectives, distorting spatial relationships. In the paintings of The Peak (1982-83), the unrealized Hong Kong Spa, for which she won first prize in an international competition, Hadid foreshadows the dynamic forcefulness of the imagined worlds she continues to paint over the next couple of decades, whether by hand, or through the highly trained digital talents in her office.

Though Russian Supramatist painter, Malevich has been cited as the major influence on her formal and conceptual approach in painting, one cannot help but wonder whether the multiple perspectives of urban networks, and layered landscapes reflect the dynamic perspective of an artist/architect that was quite literally moving between her native Baghdad, Beirut, London, New York- thus the globalism that critics refer to in a vague sense may have a more concrete influence on the work. The strangeness of juxtaposed shifting perspectives in a painting on the wall is not unfamiliar to someone looking out of an airplane window, from a particular point of departure, take off, and landing. This is perhaps a literal interpretation, but it agrees with some analysis of Hadid's work as suspended in air rather than anchored on stable ground.

There is nothing but awe at the enormous size and precision of such complex perspective paintings. To make such precise marks on such a large canvas is both physically strenuous and liberating. They suggest an implicit generosity of time, effort, and conceptual thought that translates into most of her built projects, though the built projects are not presented in a manner that sufficiently describes them. One exception is the documentary film on the BMW Plant in Leipzig, Germany, which is worth watching for the theatrics of Hadid throwing one of her infamous tantrums in the studio. An interesting side note glimpsed from an interview in the exhibition catalog is how Hadid simultaneously distances and accepts the influence of Arabic calligraphy on her forms, brush strokes and lines. When asked about such influences by Alvin Boyarsky, AA director at the time, Hadid agrees about the formal resonance, but “only in hindsight.” She reiterates the influence of 1950’s Modernist architects such as Mies Van der Rohe, and Neimeyer, whom, she reflects, where influenced by Modernist artists such as Kandinsky, who where in turn influenced by Eastern scripts, (Arabic and Chinese), as well as African art in their search for elemental geometries and “primitive” forms. It is interesting to reflect upon Hadid’s detachment from her native Iraq, (she does not comment on the current political situation in Iraq publicly). Whether this is uncharacteristic tact or whether she is merely a detached globalist is pure conjecture- though in a rare statement on early influences, she asserts the importance of travel on her vision as an architect and extols the importance of “worldliness.”

Physical Models

The physical models are grouped together and arranged chronologically
with a few exceptions. The crisp white paper relief models bear a strong connection to the paintings themselves, especially the ones which are hung on the walls. Again, this is an instance where it may have been helpful to see the models with their corresponding two-dimensional work. The paper relief models were a personal favorite, because of how clearly you can see the active manipulation of the medium’s properties, and how actions such as cuts, and incisions, create forces, which create forms, that may be translated into buildings. As Hadid’s office transforms into a larger workshop, and as the computer over-takes hand painting as the initial generative design tool, the corresponding physical models reflect the fluidity and glossiness of the designs (again, it would have been helpful to see the computer renderings alongside their related models). The luxury of the materials used in some of the later models also suggest that increasingly luxurious direction of Hadid’s work, as her acceptance by the architectural establishment, with the Pritzker Prize award, guarantees a much greater influx of clients and projects. Her office is bound to grow, and perhaps the variety of model styles and material choices in the later projects reflect the nuances of the many hands that build them.

Computer Models

The chaotic slathered quality of printed renderings on boards was not the best way to present this medium. It was difficult to understand any particular project, instead reading the renderings as a frenetic field of skyscrapers and shiny buildings. I've seen what Hadid's office can do with computer models, animating fly-through film sequences through digital models, and presenting much more evocative, fluid perspectives of buildings that harken strongly back to Hadid's early paintings. Instead the presentation of recent projects almost felt like the work of a different office. Though some of these images are enigmatic if you can manage to focus on just one, they are all polished presentation images, and the digital process is impalpable. Does this suggest that the firm no longer has time to engage in process as its commissions grow? Hopefully not.

Lara Shihab-Eldin is an architect living and working in New York. She received her Masters of Architecture from Columbia University in 2004, and holds a B.A. in Architectural Studies and Urban Planning from Brown University, where she completed a thesis on refugee camps in Beirut. After receiving her M.Arch, she worked at Field Operations, a landscape architecture and urban design firm, where she worked on the New York City High Line Park, amongst other projects. She is currently at Allied Works Architecture.