Zaha: An Architectural Legacy

I think it's all aimed at making a better world I mean I still maybe in a way still believe in the 20th century dream that Arthur could contribute to a better life so how Hadid was one of the most innovative and influential architects of our time she was the first woman to receive both the reburial gold medal and the Pritzker Prize but how did this Araki math student become the most famous architect in the world [Music] Zaha began her studies at London's a a in the early 1970s and under the guidance of their teachers including Bernhard she me and REM koolhaas and inspired by the Russian supremacist and constructivist die-hard paintings and drawings for trade lines and movements like no one else when I first saw her I knew that she was exceptional I met her at DIA because of employer she asked me to come to her crate and I did not know how her and the kid was not only for them but for few people in her studio and she behaved as if she was the cuter she dominated the studio she kept telling everybody what to do so I just thought suddenly when she started presenting her projects of my greatest surprise I found out that she was a student and I've never forgotten it because she explained her project I don't know exactly what the project was but I do know that she spent a long time talking about the Russian construct is which is of course a subject very close to me I think it's well known that the period of the a a that I'm talking about was very special and people are picking over it now wondering how and why it was so special of course it was to do with personalities but it was also to do with the system and the setting you know a row of beautiful Georgian houses in Bedford Square in a traditional academic part of the city and and yet we were imagining entirely new scenarios for cities and what uh what role architecture could play in that it was brilliant I'm told when dodge drawings were first exhibited they had a profound influence on everybody who saw them they were just a completely new approach to to looking at the city and at the plan they were obviously very influenced by her preferences in art and I think they really expanded what we thought of by an architectural drawing and what they what they could be and how they might influence the final form of the building Hong Kong was the first big one they've got international coverage which wasn't built but it kind of revealed a vision and a way of communicating architecture which had never been seen before I mean people were seduced by the drawings but they couldn't really understand them that was kind of oh my god how do we read this but they somehow seduced you into believing that there was some other kind of architecture which was less confined by gravity which was more to do with slippage and letter the dynamics of geology and the earth like rock moving was something that inspired her the vitro fire station was our house first major completed projects the building was commissioned by Beatrice Ralph L bounds in 1990 after the factory complex had been destroyed by a fire in 1981 completed in 1993 the building feels very much like being inside one of our hearth early drawings and it's sharp lines and angular walls can be seen as abstract and futuristic strokes look like earlier work it proves that Baja would not just be a paper architect [Music] so I had a very long period and she did not build anything and now since I met her and she was still a student and then and she lets go and become it like a teacher and Navi kept on reading competitions but not really being still terribly far from any constructional because her joints were not kind of promising that they could they could be built and they were far too abstract probably for the developers of the Buddhist side of what is better than what is each input in practice the Vitra building was her earliest independently standing building and it was built as a fire station it wasn't built as a gallery so it represents its time and her thinking at that time and the way that her studio was formulated and the ideas that were circulating at the time but I think this is not absolute continuous evolution of the ideas and her role in generating them I think she became more open to looking and learning and being kind of open to possibilities that perhaps she couldn't have had without you know the collaborative environment with Patrick and others well it took a while action to design we were very ambitious with our architecture this was a manifesto building for us and it turned out to become a manifesto during the program was very mundane and at various parts like a big garage part and a series of small adjunct buildings which didn't lend itself easily initially to our conception of architecture so so took a while we were all so immature and young and all of us so took unusually long to design it and to be satisfied a client kept asking was already happy many many times over we were I'm willing to release the design so we always we overworked it incredibly but it was worthwhile for us I think and then it took quite a while to also develop the drawings and construction for smuggling to gratitude on so they had complete very very pristine sculpted forms so it was a versus sloper and all through the 90s we we had only phase 2 opportunities and small buildings that some got done but it's the larger project we had started in the end in the early 90s were aborted which happens a lot we didn't realize that it's quite normal you know very disappointed but since the 2000s we picked up so much work that a lot of it also got realized while still the majority of design don't get realized [Music] by the time it completed in 2010 the maxi building in Rome became Taha'a largest project to date the building which took 11 years to complete and had negotiated six changes in the Italian government open to a mixed reaction from critics many of whom were concerns are Haas trademark sloping walls and sweeping spaces who make it difficult to display art but the building went on to win the Sterling prize being crowned the best building by a British architect in 2010 the whole story of manky starts in 1880 in 1998 this is when it was decided by the progressive governments of the time that an old military infrastructure was going to be demolished and that place we would construct the National Museum for Contemporary Art in contemporary texture I can remember her walking into the room of the culture ministry and I can still remember her description of the project when it was only maquette and she described it as a way of reinterpreting the Baroque culture and environment of overall and so that's when the whole adventure started I was on the the panel which went through all the submissions and was present when they the architects made their presentations in Rome which was a pretty memorable few days because there was REM koolhaas there was John well there was sutala Morra and there was a ha so you know these were two pretty intense days with a jury which was nearly as intense as the president presented him and what's on his project did better than any of the others is to stitch in the scheme with her sort of serpent-like structure to these series of buildings around it in such a way that was much more than some of the parts it sort of woke up the neighborhood without being actually it's not from outside of completely over-the-top buildings it's actually quite gentle the way it touches the surrounding building so from the outside in I think it was a building which actually said something and would bring new energy and life to that pretty sleepy part of middle-class Rome and it's done that Maxie is it says all in the name really although it means the Museum of the 21st century to everyone universally it sort of maximizes the sense of of space and that's controversial because the hand of the architect of Maxie is so strong that it's said to compromise the way exhibitions are staged there I think it's exciting and I for one would love to be able to curate or stage an exhibition in which I would actually use it the way it was intended that the parallel sweeping lines on the ceiling were meant to suspend our work we were ready to adopt a certain type of computation early on because our work had in three visibly signal the desire for complexity for curvy linearity for complex surfaces so Marcy Stephanie's step more complex and has more culture than Mitra but it's still compared to the recent work and was more controlled and it was the important step to say these convince ourselves about beauty and viability of this work but we have not convincing anybody else so we had to make a big effort to make ideas tangible with large models 3d computer models but also the slightly constrained and restrained palette I think it was very important strategically was an important project for her and a touching project because it was the last of the handmade as opposed to of course the computer was used but a lot of the the sculptural forms and investigations are done through those extraordinary cardboard models then yes tested on the conclusion of that there's a whole generation building since then in done by the practice which start from the computer and I think you can actually feel that and I think her passion for the building she immediately said it and I remember that building was so important for me there was also wrong you know Rome Rome for Zaha to baroque from figure voluptuous and every sense in other one she enjoyed the drama that she created on the streets and the headlines of the time were la Bordeaux meaning you know the the female Bordeaux meaning has come four hundred years after Anna cook she does roared with laughter and thought this was absolutely hysterical [Music] in 2004 while how has chosen to Deline the Aquatic Center for the London 2012 Olympic Games the building like many asahi's other projects was heavily influenced by landscape and the city and was designed to reflect the surrounding Park her first major building in London the project propels our heart into the public eye Zaha scheme was one of the few which was totally clear about what should happen during the games in order to accommodate 17,000 people in terms of ticket holders and what should happen after the games when it should be a wonderful but in the end community pool I remember going to an event which was the celebration of the legacy building where there was divers and everything else and lights and music and everything else you could finally see what Zod had in her mind all the time and that's what thousands of kids and adults use every week now I mean that's real legacy for a building of that sort you know I think it was in each Kippur when she died that night on Radio 4 or on talked about the fact that you know anyone doing backstroke in that pool looks up and sees this ribbed timber roof which she had conceived and all of those who swim doing the backstroke and a very nice idea actually get that experience that she had in her mind machine she was a natural stuff in many ways she always felt special and the school already the students she was treated as a staff student she was very early only limited in Rome and MoMA early already and then again that there we constructors and show at the ICA in London so for her and she was an internist I considered her to be a star within the discipline gradually this became more and there's not architectural magazines that we came in on Vulcan Bazaar Harper's Bazaar on a broad sheet paper that just happened and but she didn't change too much to this we didn't change our relationship didn't change she was very coachable and we're all a big family here as she became more more famous I think what ended happened was that she kind of expanded the whole consumption of designer so I used to find in recent times young children wouldn't know her name which is fairly rare you know girls school that I did a lecture at I remember people doing knowing which she was so in a way she expanded the whole palette of design as she became normal things so we could relate her to ordinary objects we could relate it to very large scale buildings and the fame never really made her big-headed in my opinion but what he didn't do is raise the whole profile natural design raised the profile of what we all do yet she didn't change a huge amount in the time I knew her she still had a tendency to be shy even though people don't read it that way she had a tendency to be loyal to the work and very very forceful about what she wanted and what she didn't want so these things and were the things that I don't think changed because as a person I don't believe she changed enormously I just think the way we consume the world improved as it became more and more visible and Express expression to people [Music] at a time of her death so hard practice have more than 60 active projects the legacy of the studio she created will live on through this work da Hye left an indelible mark on architecture creating her own unforgettable style which pushed the boundaries [Music] if you know it's very difficult to talk about like a secret for anyone and I think architecture is such a thing that it aside from agriculture it's one of the only things you leave behind also let's go without leaving behind what we did so it is ahead of a time in that sense that is an architect you do leave something behind but most of the buildings so unique and the geographical spread across communities but I think the legacy of how people use those buildings and we experience them today this whole idea of multiple perspectives that you see in the pheno Science Center for example when you walk through experience is so unlike any other building it's almost close to nature Baku the azerbaijan projects similar the multi perspectives that people talked about the idea of movement and static building when you see it it feels like it's moving those kind of legacies of one we experience the use of those buildings but also what our eye takes in in terms of shape technology I think our legacies from my own perspective the legacies I would say is the advance of advancement of technology I think zags banded the definition of architecture expanded what was conceived as possible those buildings that were once thought of as unbuildable as concepts or as pieces of art as they became realized it really opened the eyes of clients and of the public on what space could be I don't think I have to say when she said that she didn't like to be recalled a woman women's architect she was not she was the architect well that made it quite public in interviews and radio programs and interviews with the press that she from an early life made a compromise that in order for her to execute her art a lot of other things has to be put aside and she mentioned this you know relationships family so there was somewhere in her in her heart and her mind this total dedication to what she believed in you know and the creativity comes with a sort of psychological strength which was also touching when she in the gold medal showed pictures of the age of 12 rearranging her furniture and her mother saying okay yes you did redecorate your room how can you ask someone else to do it because you know anyway you're going to have your own way and I think that that was all the way until the day she went to Miami and then never came back she's left many traces that will endure for a very long time and she became the most famous architect in the world and a woman and an Iraqi I mean that's pretty impressive so as a person she leaves great inspiration because she was courageous and you know rarely compromised and stuck to her guns and I think we have to sort of see the work as an inspiration for real architecture and try not to worship her too much I think she was an extraordinary figure but people need to be confident enough to perhaps continue the experiment and let it evolve into something else I wish that on the office and on you know other students of architecture and objects of the future that is that they it's it's work is a body of inspirational material I think it was a massive massive impact the degrees of freedom a designer now has has been massively expanded but her the way she was able to use the rapid hand move with the calligraphy of C word pulsating curvature to be a legitimate architectural possibility was very important and that has been picked up for many others by whole new generation of architects and I think that's just at the beginning of impacting the build environment with this new degrees of freedom which are new repertoire a new problem-solving repertoire therefore so the legacy is I think growing it's now down to future generations of Architects the continues our hearts legacy of experimentation and innovation I think at the end it really is about well-being you have to make you have to feel good you know you might be startled or the wildered or whatever but you have to feel good [Music]

Channel: Architects' Journal

Views: 165,328

Rating: 4.9143729 out of 5

Keywords: Architects;, Architecture;, Architects', Journal;, Zaha Hadid

Id: Oy2QIiSQT2U

Length: 27min 6sec (1626 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 30 2017