Zaha Hadid: Sketching the Future

you [Music] [Music] [Music] so I would always have a notebook with her you know and that was like her visual diary you know she was an amazing amazing super fluid drawings most of her buildings he would find them as caches in the notebooks [Music] often lights will be switched on in her studio and people who pass by the house and she would go out late night hours to to do these extraordinary paintings which are which are really very big big visions for for flu in 21st century cities I post a handwritten note every day by an artist or an architect for my for my Instagram it's kind of a protest against the disciplines of handwriting and he connects deeply desire you know because it has to do with doodling and drawing and so as I had took a pen and she wrote on a post-it it's also fantastic that I'm acknowledged for work which was really not mainstream was very deliberately trying to questions all the things that people took kind of took for granted I would go to the hobby Ada and I and she would not only talk about art and architecture but also fascinating he said because she for the first time started to show sketches doodles she had never shown before and I was pretty amazed when you see these young girls in their Western clothes so assured and confident you're inclined to forget how surprised their mothers would be the idea of training for jobs their daughters taken their stride so I grew up in Baghdad Baghdad was full of optimism and hope and positivity there was a very strong presence also of modern architecture we should never forget that she also grew up with calligraphy she encountered early on calligraphic drawings and that's something which continued for the rest of her life the depends of zhehan encouraged her from very early days to experiment she was encouraged to design her own living room to design her own clothes so this idea which of course means that all aspects of life could be designed from the color from the living room from the apartment to the city's to the world - maybe the universe you know [Music] there are no boundaries in the way between art and architecture and design I think this idea of the utopia of art and architecture entering society the transformative power art and architecture could have for something she experienced very very early on [Music] when she arrived in London she was really ready for the radical experiments of the architectural Association at the time you chose a very you know futuristic spirit from the very beginnings I showed this interest in in Russian avant-garde she said I was a senior at the AAA in 1977 attacked on my graduation project Malevich's tectonic [Music] it was a hotel sitting on or hanging from hanger for bridge so she would bring the Russian constructivism into London so you have here lots of elements like the horizontal elevation as well as the residues of this super imposition which continue to play a role later on ER it's kind of interesting and very fascinating that jaha never was nostalgic there was never a sense of the past as something finished she would revisit my leverage or she would revisit Taplin who of course was another you know big influence she would do that in a very dynamic way so it would basically be the past as a toolbox to invent the future we can say that Zaha early on found her language interlocking angular forms and it is fluid urban spaces which anticipated so much of you know the city he took also a long time for her to actually have her first building ever realized which is in 93 the vitro fire station is very much a manifesto you have her language there when you have fragmentation you have abstraction you have deconstruction and this idea of repetitiveness and mass production there is also this idea that it defies gravity but we can see things being frozen and things being in movement if you look at the the complex construction individual building of you know crashing and tilted sort of planes I can of course see there you know the link to suprematism which creates a suspense and creates a tension with something I have never experienced in that kind of way [Music] it doesn't remind you of anything else you've seen before and I think that's what happened you know people went to be trans or his structure of Zaha and and realized that she had invented you know a totally new route a totally new language one of us will do a sketch and the sketch translated into a more elaborate sketch and then it has an idea you know you move faster if you are a versatile and you are able to do things quite quickly here is what Zanna told me the sketches are interesting because they became a method if I would trace one layer to another on paper he gave me the right degree of transparency she mix his angles and the curves and it creates a kind of a frozen movement because that's of course something which happens in her drawings and in her paintings she showed me one notebook where you see really the genesis of the maxi museum and you saw how the entire building just grew [Music] as a Hitomi you know it's why she likes drawing so much it's because you make mistakes and then when you make mistakes you can start seeing things differently there isn't much of an element of chance unless you build randomized progress into a project I think what was interesting in a way what we we decided even with hand drawings that drawing plans and sections was not enough to explore maybe new thinking in architecture I think but it's also so fascinating about the house drawings is you know the digital age all of a sudden allowed her to build but she conceives much earlier in the drawings and you know people who never have thought at the moment of her early drawings that that would ever be buildable [Music] I will never forget and I visited her FINA building at the very beginning you know when it when it opened first of all he completely changed the kind of feeling I had about concrete because I always thought the concrete or somehow you know connected to Brutalism that it was a brutal material but in a way the almost weightless as a kind of fluidity such a high uses concrete makes it very human but is a kind of a human Brutalism yeah I mean first Athena and also the Maxie buildings of course two examples I could you know really apply her language but full complexity on a on a very large scale [Music] [Music] so that the second-leading of the seven time basically became de has first building in in central London and it's even now that she built you know the Aquatic Center for the Olympics as well as also a school then it remains her only structure in central London so I basically added a completely contemporary element and it's very much an oxymoron in over the past needs the present and projects it into the into the future it is not touching the the old structure but it's completely at the essence so it's a kind of an encounter you can say bye-bye separation [Music] you know we should never forget that sometimes we encounter historic figures you know among our contemporaries and I always think you know that Zaha is wrong she's a historic figure you know we've been so lucky to to work with to be friends with and I think she's one of the great architects and artists of the 20th and 21st century and there's so many dimensions to her work which still ought to be discovered [Music] [Music] you

Channel: HENI Talks

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Rating: 4.9756098 out of 5

Keywords: zaha hadid, hans ulrich obrist, serpentine, hans ulrich obrist interview, hans ulrich obrist 2018, zaha hadid architecture, zaha hadid documentary, Zaha Hadid Serpentine, zaha hadid sketchup, Zaha Hadid sketching, Hans Ulrich Obrist talk, zaha hadid hans ulrich, Zaha Hadid sketchbooks, Zaha Hadid interview, zaha hadid architects, zaha hadid architecture documentary, Women architecture, Women architects, zaha hadid buildings

Id: GW3CDwcv-X8

Length: 12min 53sec (773 seconds)

Published: Fri May 25 2018