Zaha Hadid: The Lady Gaga of Architecture

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 Yorkers 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:

The most startling of these models emerged like a projectile out of a pierced museum wall, plunging earthward at a sharp angle. From a deconstructivist point of view, it deserved high marks: it was disturbing, disconcerting, and discombobulating. At a second glance, one saw that it wasn’t a projectile, but an exclusive social club, situated on a mountainside high above Hong Kong’s harbor….

The project [is] as yet unbuilt, but is said to be buildable.

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

Hadid’s first designs … were conceptually heavy and were difficult to understand except as a series of fragmented, disconnected masses floating in space. It was easy, back then, to wonder if Cincinnati, in its eagerness to embrace the avant-garde, would be willing to challenge its architect to stay within the bounds of reality. Hadid might have sold the museum a bill of experimental goods.

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:

“Abstraction opened the possibility of unfettered invention,” Hadid said in her Pritzker [Prize] address. When I asked her to explain how, she said that abstraction gave her a way to study how lines intersect. When she drew, she said, “I wanted to capture a line, and the way a line changes and distorts when you try to follow it through a building, as it passes through regions of light and shadow. You know when you look through a building from a window on the outside, and the line you are following is distorted by the space? That was what I was trying to see with my paintings and my whooshings.” _The articles—and the complete archives of The New Yorker, back to 1925—are available to subscribers. Non-subscribers can purchase the individual issues.

Any favorite New Yorker articles come to mind? Send us an e-mail.

Photograph by Miles Alridge.