"Now she is a planet, in her own inimitable orbit". (Rem Koolhaas, fifth year report at the Architectural Association in London 1977.)
Like an imaginary solution, she radiates in the void, replete with that which absorbed everything, transgressed everything, a pataphysical ambiance, as if the conjunction in the infinite of the real and the rational has been realized under an ecstatic form of the real, here and now in Rome.
On March 12th 1999, Zaha Hadid won the competition for the contemporary art museum, a satellite project to the existing Museum of Modern Art in Rome. Indeed the new regime in Italy, the center left coalition that has emerged in the aftermath of the Cold War, after a period of entrepreneurial Berlusconian demagogy, has finally established a new alliance. A reformed Communist party, together with the revamped and purged Christian democrats, have shed their cynical former selves (Andreotti) are now embarking upon a series of cultural initiatives to put Rome on a level in the museum world which will be comparable with the MOMA New York, the Tate gallery Bankside London and the Beaubourg in Paris.
Evidently a new and younger generation of politicians has identified with what a shrewd museum director in New York referred to as the 'Bilbao effect': the possibility of an extraordinary, inspired project which will generate a new and vigorous public interest in a contemporary art subject, usually of no consequence in the eternal city. Zaha Hadid is among the few who could rise to this challenge with a certain exhilaration which is yet to be matched in contemporary architecture: her vision, revision and her absolute need for inventiveness, the art of architecture, observed John Soane, is the art of invention which is as difficult as it is painful. 'In every project there are new territories to be invented and others to be conquered; and this is only the beginning' Zaha Hadid declared shortly after she won the competition for "The Peak" (Kowloon, Hongkong 1982/1983) project, the quality of which was first recognized by Arata Isozaki (see "GA" architect; 5 Tokyo, 1986) who championed it magnanimously, only for it to be abandoned subsequently. She remained constant in her conviction, realizing early on that "architecture's role had yet to be fulfilled and that there were new territories which were yet to be explored."
Rare, difficult and admirable was her stand when she outlined her objective: "we the authors of Architecture have to take on the task of reinvestigating modernity".(see "Planetary architecture two", Architectural Association, London 1983).
Seldom are we aware of the atmospheric pressure on us, and yet we are caught in the opposition light/weight. In James Joyce's "Ulysses", the Ithaca chapter, Bloom imagines the people of Israel, or Ireland, escaping Earth for distant planets. He then recalls some reading in popular science. Nothing with footnotes, just the sort of book where youngsters learn that the atmospheric pressure spread out over an entire body could reach '19 tons'. When questioned by Alvin Boyarsky "it is as if there is a zero gravity condition', Zaha Hadid replied: "I almost believed that there was such a thing as zero gravity. I can actually now believe that building can float, they don't but I almost believed it" adding "except when I see my engineers." In a more recent dialogue she said: "Also this notion that there is another force, that you are free from a certain restriction, this whole idea of liberation from gravity is not because you are flying around in the air but because you are freed from existing orders. Therefore you have a new order and there may be many others." Learning from Malevich, the plan became fluid and fragmented, a subject to calculated randomness. It meant that space itself could be conceived of and carve away and inhabit "spaces which are special."
A wave indecipherable in terms of language and meaning carries events as if they were many layers of swimmers in heavy water or over centuries.
The seismic form has become her paradigm, the ground suspended, fault and failure, dehiscence and fractal objects. Immense plates, entire layers, slide one beside and over the other, injecting the energy to produce intense surface tremors. As if she alone is capable of preserving the secret believed so feverishly by her elected predecessors, Malevich, El Lissitzky, Melnikov and Leonidov.
Her line has acquired the fluidity of the pen, these very fluid spaces seem to flow like a line, like a sentence as if from an inner fountain free from the tyranny of the empirical world which hampers so many of her contemporaries.
Indeed, for her "certain things erupt, due to a sheer physical power..." and she goes on to say: "it's only in these moments that things begin to burst, I had a longing to do something which was not an accepted type, to break certain barriers."
Her kingdom then, is of anomaly/anomie and her field aleatory, statistical, a field of intersecting verticals and horizontals in variations and modulations which thrive on subversion. This waywardness restores the enigma to an otherwise inexplicable drive, a drive to maintain the power of illusion and the seduction of appearances.
Horizontal drifts, the symbolic energy of a rupture seems to be cultivated in both of her recent museum projects. The tactile presence of these infinite layers suggest the uncanniness of ruins.
In Rome as in Cincinnati, Zaha Hadid offers endless series of fractal events, with gradual slides, traces of future memory and/or a rehearsal for a great premiere?
Against the background of a number of outstanding projects won, but unrealized, such as Cardiff Bay Opera House, Zaha Hadid did not show any sign of despair. On the contrary, as her paradigm continue to be explored, territories, largely of her own invention were beginning to become our landscape. Her unique capacity to develop a language of her own has been readily adopted as the lingua franca of the architecture of tomorrow.
The verse of her fire station at Vitra of yesterday has become the prose of civic and public institutions of today. In her projects, the relative autonomy of architecture unexpectedly, gains an incomparable practitioner, able to forge links with the rudiments of the language by reinventing them. Point, line and plan, have acquired a totally and unexpected character. Not so much by exotic iconography or orthography but by a radical decimation of the ciphers of any possible language, or better still by trusting the mind to compose from thin air, in reverse. As if the smoke traces the shape of the fire and the autumn leaves anticipate the wind that will move them.
She has evidently been able to listen to the stones and the trees when others had their noses buried in a book. Life itself serves as her dictionary.
Rome was quick to learn many important lessons from Babylonian culture and it appears to do so again. Curiously, Zaha Hadid's Museum of Contemporary Art conceived among other things as marking the Jubilee, perhaps the largest intrusion of alien wisdom which ever made a successful claim on pagan Rome.
We can only wonder at these elective affinities, which are certainly deeper and stronger than either we or Hadid herself could ever fathom.
This old planet Earth, thanks to planet Hadid, in this or any other millennium, acquires an incomparable dimension. The music of the spheres, is heard from a new planet; it is the unnameable and the unexpected, a gift.
Yehuda Safran
New York, 28.IV.99
FROM: SANDRINE, TRANS>
TO: CHRISTIAN
DATE: 5.3.1999
NOTE: Christian, please note correction to Hehuda Safran's article:
Her kingdom then, is of anomaly/anomie and her field aleatory, statistical, a field of intersecting verticals and horizontals in variations and modulations which thrive on subversion. This waywardness restores the enigma to an otherwise inexplicable drive, a drive to maintain the power of illusion and the seduction of appearances.
Horizontal drifts, the symbolic energy of a rupture seems to be cultivated in both of her recent museum projects. The tactile presence of these infinite layers suggest the uncanniness of ruins.
In Rome as in Cincinnati, Zaha Hadid offers endless series of fractal events, with gradual slides, traces of future memory and/or a rehearsal for a great premiere?
Against the background of a number of outstanding projects won, but unrealized, such as Cardiff Bay Opera House, Zaha Hadid did not show any sign of despair. On the contrary, as her paradigm continue to be explored, territories, largely of her own invention were beginning to become our landscape. Her unique capacity to develop a language of her own has been readily adopted as the lingua franca of the architecture of tomorrow.
The verse of her fire station at Vitra of yesterday has become the prose of civic and public institutions of today. In her projects, the relative autonomy of architecture unexpectedly, gains an incomparable practitioner, able to forge links with the rudiments of the language by reinventing them. Point, line and plan, have acquired a totally and unexpected character. Not so much by exotic iconography or orthography but by a radical decimation of the ciphers of any possible language, or better still by trusting the mind to compose from thin air, in reverse. As if the smoke traces the shape of the fire and the autumn leaves anticipate the wind that will move them.
She has evidently been able to listen to the stones and the trees when others had their noses buried in a book. Life itself serves as her dictionary.
Rome was quick to learn many important lessons from Babylonian culture and it appears to do so again. Curiously, Zaha Hadid's Museum of Contemporary Art conceived among other things as marking the Jubilee, perhaps the largest intrusion of alien wisdom which ever made a successful claim on pagan Rome.
We can only wonder at these elective affinities, which are certainly deeper and stronger than either we or Hadid herself could ever fathom.
This old planet Earth, thanks to planet Hadid, in this or any other millennium, acquires an incomparable dimension. The music of the spheres, is heard from a new planet; it is the unnameable and the unexpected, a gift.