ZAHA HADID "Gravity-defying", "fragmentary" and "revolutionary" are a few of the words used to describe Zaha Hadid's architectural designs. The Iraqi-born, London-based architect has stirred up continual controversy with her designs that defy a label in the Modern vs. Post-Modern architectural debate. In the past 15 years, she has gone from unknown student to "architecture's new diva" as the title of the January 1996 Architectural DigestUs profile suggested. Her work has been accepted as a significant contribution to architecture and her style is one that other architects now emulate.
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Zaha Hadid has been a persistent radical in the field of architectural experimentation for the last 20 years. The importance of her contribution to the culture of architecture lies primarily in a series of momentous expansions - as influential as radical - in the repertoire of spatial articulation available to architects today. These conquests for the design resources of the discipline include representational devices, graphic manipulations, compositional manoeuvres, spatial concepts, typological inventions and (beyond the supposed remit of the discipline proper) the suggestion of new modes or patterns of inhabitation. This list of contributions describes a causal chain that significantly moves from the superficial to the substantial and thus reverses the order of ends vs. means assumed in normative models of rationality. The project starts as a shot into the dark, spreading its trajectories, and assuming its target in midcourse. The point of departure is the assumption of a new medium (multi perspective projection) which allows for certain graphic operations (multiple, over-determining distortions) which then are made operative as compositional transformations (fragmentation and deformation) leading to a new concept of space (magnetic field space, particle space, distorted space) which suggests a new phenomenology, navigation and inhabitation of space no longer oriented along prominent figures, axis, edges and clearly bounded realms. Instead the distribution of densities, directional bias, scalar grains and gradient vectors of transformation constitute the new ontology defining what it means to be somewhere
These characteristics might serve to qualify her under Howard Gardner's definition of creativity. "The creative individual is a person who regularly solves problems, fashions products, or defines new questions in a domain in a way that is initially considered novel but that ultimately becomes accepted in a particular cultural setting." (Gardner 1993)
Architecture was the re-presentation of a fixed set of minutely determined typologies and complete tectonic systems. Against this backdrop abstraction meant the possibility and challenge of free creation. The canvas became the field of an original construction. The introduction of categories such as "manifesto", "the discipline of architecture " and "oeuvre" suspends but does not cancel or deny concerns of utility. These categories are not set absolute, autonomous and forever aloof from the functional concerns of society. Rather the concrete uses and users are bracketed for the sake of experimenting with new, potentially general sable principles of spatial organization and articulation with respect to emerging social demands and use patterns. Functional optimality according to well corroborated criteria is thus renunciated for the experimental advancement of social practices of potentially higher functionality. The very nature of the kind of iconoclastic research of "the avant garde" is that it thrusts itself into the unknown and offers its challenging proposals to the collective process of experimentation in a raw state rather than waiting until the full cycle of experimentation, variation, selection, optimization and refinement is complete and ready to present secure and polished results. Despite the often precarious status of its partial and preliminary results I will argue that this radicalism constitutes a form of research; an unorthodox research in as much as it's methods include intuitive groping, randomization and automatic formal processes, i.e. the temporary relaxation and even suspension of rational criteria. RESOURCES OF THE RADICAL IMAGINATION Creative Revivalism It is no accident hat the New in the arts always announces itself in the guise of a revival. Hadid's career starts with the reinterpretation of Malevitch's tectonics. Her early work has indeed been (mis-)understood as Neo-constructivism. Also one might recount how Peter Eisenman takes off from the early Le Corbusier. Revivalist appropriation is the easiest and most immediate option to articulate dissatisfaction and resistance towards a dominant practise. But this has nothing to do with repetition. For instance, to pick up the unfinished project of modernism on the back of post-modernism can not be a simple re-enactment, even if one initially works with literal citations. For a culture which reflects its own history, this history can never be circular. Although there have been attempts to write a circular, discursively the second time can never be the same. Also: what usually follows on from the second time clearly reveals its irreducible newness. Revivalism - the hurling back in front of what was left behind - has been a pervasive and effective mechanism in the production of the New. The re-introduction of formal systems leads inevitably to over-determination, distortion and transformation. Re- combination: Collage and Hybridisation The second mechanism that has to be mentioned here is the dialectic of re-combination and hybridisation. The important reminder here is that the result of combination is rarely just a predictable compromise. Synenergies might be harnessed: Unpredictable operational effects might emerge and, on the side of meaning, affects are engendered as the whole taxonomy of differences is forced into an unpredictable realignment. The new combination re-contextualises and reinterprets its ingredients as well as its surroundings.
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Analogies Analogies are fantastic engines of invention with respect to organisational diagrammes, formal languages and tectonic systems. They have nothing to do with allegory or semantics in general. Hadid's preferred source realm of analogical transference is the inexhaustible realm of landscape formations: forests, canyons, river deltas, dunes, glaciers/moraines, faulted geological strata, lava flows etc. Beyond such specific formations abstract formal characteristics of landscape in general are brought into the ambit of architectural articulation. The notion of an artificial landscape has been a pervasive working hypothesis within Hadid's oeuvre from the Hong Kong Peak onwards. Artificial landscapes are coherent spatial systems. They reject platonic exactitude but they are not just any "freeform". They have their peculiar lawfulness. They operate via gradients rather than hard edge delineation. They proliferate infinite variations rather than operating via the repetition of discrete types. They are indeterminate and leave room for active interpretation on the part of the inhabitants. Another source realm is food stuffs: sandwiches, melted cheese, chewing gum, papadams, spaghetti. Ultimately anything could serve as analogical inspiration. Often such analogies become to be considered as the concept of the project: The
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Abstraction Abstraction implies the avoidance of familiar, ready-made typologies. Instead of taking for granted things like houses, rooms, windows, roofs etc. Hadid reconstitutes the functions of territorialisation, enclosure and interfacing etc. by means of boundaries, fields, planes, volumes, cuts, ribbons etc. The creative freedom of this approach is due to the openendedness of the compositional configurations as well as the open-endedness of the list of abstract entities that enter into the composition. (To maintain the spirit of abstraction in the final building a defamiliarising, "minimalist" detailing is avoiding that cuts turn into windows again.)
Cardiff Opera House as an inverted necklace, the Copenhagen Concert Hall as a block of terrazzo, the Victoria and Albert Museum extension as 3D TV, i.e. a three-dimensional pixelation etc. Surrealist mechanisms One of the most significant and momentous features of architectural avant-garde of the last 15 years is the proliferation of representational media and design processes and the attendant theoretical reflection on those media and processes. Hadid's audacious move to translate the dynamism and fluidity of her calligraphic hand directly into equally fluid tectonic systems, her incredible move from isometric and perspective projection to literal distortions of space, from the exploded axonometry to the literal explosion of space into fragments, from the superimposition of various fisheye perspectives to the literal bending and melt down of space etc. - all these moves must initially appear rampantly illogical, akin to the operations of the surrealists. But then these strange moves - once taken seriously within the context of developing an architectural project - turn out to be powerful compositional options when faced with the task of articulating complex programmes. The dynamic streams of movements within a complex structure can now be made legible as the most fluid regions within the structure; overall trapezoidal distortions offer one more way to respond to non-orthogonal sites; perspective distortions allow the orientation of elements to various functional focal points etc. What once was an outrageous violation of logic has become part of a strategically deployed repertoire of nuanced spatial organisation and articulation. The initially "mindless" sketching of graphic textures in endless iterations operates like an "abstract machine" proliferating difference to select from. Once a strange texture or figure is selected and confronted with a programmatic agenda a peculiar form-content dialectic is engendered. An active figure-reading mind will find the desired conditions but equally new desires and functions are inspired by the encounter with the strange configuration. The radically irrational and arbitrary detour ends up hitting a target. This "miracle" can be explained by recognizing that all functionality is relative, that all well articulated organisms have once been monstrous aberrations and still are such - relative to other "higher" and more "beautiful" organisations. Harnessing the power of chance More and more it seems to become an urgency to incorporate the category of random accidents and chance mutations into our theories of innovation and progress, even though these terms - randomness and progress - have hitherto been absolutely anti-thetical. Randomness seems to be the absolute antithesis of any notion of strategic conduct or rationality. Form-generating aleatoric processes involve the radical suspension of everything usually associated with "design" as deliberate purpose-lead activity, directed to solve well-defined problems according to known and explicit criteria. In the aleatoric design method the formal process is running ahead and a meaning and programme is read into it a posteriori, allowing for an innovative (re-)alignment of both new form and new function. The aleatoric "play" is an instrument of intelligence, not its negation or substitute. As in biological evolution, the necessary condition for the ability to harness chance for the purposes of innovation is reproduction, i.e. the ability to reproduce an initially unintended and uncontrolled effect. The machinic process becomes domesticated and human. What was play has become method.
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"Playfulness is the deliberate, temporary relaxation of rules in order to explore the possibilities of alternative rules. When we are playful we challenge the necessity of consistency. In effect, we announce - in advance - our rejection of usual objections to behaviour that does not fit the standard model of intelligence. Playfulness allows experimentation. At the same time, it acknowledges reason. It accepts that at one point ... it will be integrated into the structure of intelligence. ... tolerant of the idea that he will discover the meaning of yesterday's action in the experiences and interpretations of today."(4) Such reasoning might grant us some breathing space for experimentation not only on the drawing board, but also - within certain limits - with the building itself. Who is to judge and deny a priori that a strange building will not attract and engender a strangely productive occupation.
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INFLUENCES (People and Styles) After receiving her Diploma Prize in 1977 from the Architectural Association, Hadid went to work with one of her tutors, Rem Koolhaus, at OMA, Office of Modern Architecture. This relationship soon became too restrictive for Hadid, although she and Koolhaus remained close friends. Hadid remarked: "My relation with OMA is more fundamental than working with them. There is almost a kind of nonvisible dialogue between us... they supported me a lot when I was no question about that." Koolhaus served as a mentor and friend to Hadid during the time of her first breakthrough. As her former tutor at the Architectural Association, he could understand her work and the ideas that she was trying to convey. She obviously respects his opinion and values his friendship.
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CHILD-LIKE MIND
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Hadid also fits into the child-like character of geniuses in other ways some critics say. She has a tendency to portray a haughty attitude toward clients and the general public and her new style of painting (which I discuss under Domain) fails to help viewers interpret her ideas. (Vine 1995)
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I propose that the pedagogy at the Architectural Association provided the freedom for Zaha Hadid to explore issues that reflect a child-like mind. A main theme of Hadid's designs exhibits that a building can float and defy gravity. This attitude is reminiscent of a child's drawings before someone forces the concept of gravity upon them. The idea of defying gravity does not come from flying in the air, but from being freed from confining laws and conventions and making a new kind of space; consequently, answering a child's question in an adult manner.
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Another issue that separated Zaha Hadid from even other AA students was her non-Western European background. Hadid comments, "I think being a foreigner in London in the seventies was also a very interesting period because it was after the sixty-eight revolution, people were much more liberal. They did not equate ideas to making money. This notion of displacement, being displaced is a very liberated experience. More and more because I was a woman, non-British and it kind of confused the people there. The more became confused about me the more they left me alone." (Hadid 1995)
The rejection of Hadid's design brings up an interesting aspect of Gardner's definition of creativity which specified that it must be within a specific culture. Who defines if a culture accepts an idea and what defines the limits of a culture? Would the British culture which differs from the more accepting German culture define the architectural profession's opinion of Hadid's work? In Japan, they are also more enthusiastic about Hadid's designs. Mario Botta commented, "she joins the trend of spectacular hypertechnological architecture which represents the common denominator of the latest events on this Asian archipelago." Hadid's marginality leads to a characteristic that distinguishes her from others. Hadid proposes, "Because I am a non-European I have a different system of thinking, my order is different. Deconstructionism and the structuralist theories are based on theories which were so-called rationalist, one way of doing things. I don't belong to that tradition. I belong to a tradition which already has a different order. They are called more emotional, intuitive, but intuitive is not instinctive. Intuitive is the marriage of rationalism and experience."
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MARGINALITY
