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August 18, 2006
Big Architecture - Hadid at the Guggenheim
If there's a Most Important Living Architect right now I guess it's either Frank Gehry or Zaha Hadid. The Guggenheim has a big show on Hadid up through late October (you know, THE Guggenheim, as opposed to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice or the Guggenheim-Bilbao [designed by Gehry, by the way] or the Guggenheim-Soho or the Guggenheim-whatever-they-decide-to-do-next).
Zaha Hadid won the Pritzker Prize in 2002 (Gehry in 1990). She has practiced as an architect, but seems to mainly have made her living before the late 90s as a professor of architecture (and still held a teaching position in Vienna when she won the Pritzker). This means that she's one of those folks who didn't build much of the work that made her famous. Her first building in the rain, seen over and over in the show, was a firehouse for a factory complex in Germany. Most of her built work seems to be in Germany - she didn't win a commission for work in England (where she seems to lived for most of her adult life) until after the Pritzker. The only building she has completed in America is the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati (though there were some references in wall text to a house in Los Angeles that is perhaps under construction). Now she's building skyscrapers in Dubai.
Here is the link to the highlights from the show.
This trajectory - getting famous despite never getting the job - seems pretty normal for late 20th century architects. I'm never sure what I think about it. Are they really rejected because they are too avant-garde, or because their buildings are simply impractical? I've talked to two architect friends (one of whom likes her work very much and one of who dislikes her work at least a little). We all agreed that we want to hear from real users. The video shot in the BMW headquarters in Wurzburg (the building I liked the best) was far too self-congratulatory and corporate-public-relations massaged to take very seriously as an evaluation of how the building works.
Her main idea in that building seems to have been to break down the hierarchical division between manaqement and line workers by putting them in one building and indeed running the assembly line overhead through the management space - so the production workers can never be out of sight of the white collar workers. Not in a supervisory (or Foucaultian scopic) way, but in a forced-presence kind of way. Maybe. We'll see. Come back and ask in 15 years and see what they've changed.
I dislike Brutalist exposed concrete. I really do. There were people on video ooohing and aaahing over the beauty of the concrete in one of her buildings. I used the Paul Rudolph chapel at Emory regularly - it was gorgeous, as poured concrete goes. But still - the eternal grey is deadening, and would be worse in Northern Europe than in Atlanta, I'd expect. Here's a nice article about the chapel from an Emory site. Here are some better pictures.
The exhibition was very interestingly handled - we spiral up the Guggenheim's great ramp and see ZH chronologically. Since she didn't build much in her early career what we start with are really very nice large scale abstract paintings that she used as conceptual models. Then we slowly wind our way up past less abstract computer renderings, then paper modelling (folded and cut paper reliefs as wall-hangings) of some buildings that ARE built. By that point I began to be able to understand what she was doing. I don't necessarily like it any more, but until the 3rd level of the ramp I didn't really understand what the buildings were supposed to be like. Next came actual 3-d models, things that a client might have been able to use to make a decision. Eventually we got photography and video of built work. The final room was her latest version of the paintings - a digital imaging technology of silver prints - very cool and elegant.
There was no investigation of collaboration - we have no clue at the end of the show how many people work for her practice (it's obvious she isn't doing all this herself) or even who she worked for before she went out on her own. The show is all Zaha Hadid all the time - a classic example of the deification of the Most Important Architect.
I will not link to Hadid's own site - her Flash introduction has locked up my computer twice -- one of the best examples I have ever seen of Architect Totalitarianism. You WILL watch her face decompose in Flash forever, or until you restart your computer.
From the same trip - The Cloisters, part I
- Making discriminations at the Frick
- Dada at the MoMA
Posted by CrankyProfessor at August 18, 2006 11:44 AM