In this week’s issue, Paul Goldberger writes about two new British buildings designed by Zaha Hadid: the Riverside Museum in Glasgow and the Evelyn Grace Academy in Brixton. Though based in London, Hadid has, until recently, had little success in the United Kingdom. Goldberger observes that “the British may lately have begin to realize that, like Lady Gaga, Hadid has rather more to her than a showy exterior.”
Hadid first came to The New Yorker’s attention in 1988, when Brendan Gill reviewed a show called “Deconstructivist Architecture” at the Museum of Modern Art, which was co-curated by Philip Johnson. The show featured drawings and models by architects who, in Gill’s words, share “certain ambitions in respect to expanding our conventional notion of architectural design … in a fashion that is sometimes exhilarating and sometimes exasperating.” Gill singled out Hadid’s contribution to the show:
In 2003, Paul Goldberger mentioned that Hong Kong design in his review of Hadid’s Lois and Richard Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati, saying that
However, Goldberger went on to write, the Cincinnati museum “ought to stifle doubts about Zaha Hadid’s work being either buildable or workable.” The building “puts her in the center on the international architecture star map.”
Two years ago, John Seabrook profiled Hadid and described the opening of her largest project to date, the National Museum of the XXI Century Arts, or MAXXI, in Rome. It’s no surprise to learn from the piece that in her student years, Hadid was heavily influenced by the work of a painter: Kazmir Malevich. In the nineteen-twenties, the Russian artist produced a series of abstract models for buildings, which he called “architektons.” Hadid discussed the importance of abstraction in the development of her innovative style:
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Photograph by Miles Alridge.