Visionary:
Zaha Hadid Retrospective at the Guggenheim
Museum, New York
"My ambition is always to realize
theoretical projects that seem difficult at the time." – Zaha Hadid
Zaha Hadid at the opening of the anniversary exhibition "25"
at Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin, 2005
Tilted
planes, protruding roofs, walls that meet in acute angles: Zaha Hadid’s
designs and projects seem to deactivate the laws of statics and gravity.
For over 20 years, her buildings have continually been influencing and
revolutionizing the architecture world. She was the first and to date only
woman to receive the renowned
Pritzker Prize in 2004, which is regarded as the Nobel Prize of
architecture. Recently, Zaha Hadid has also been active as an exhibition
architect, designing
"25", the anniversary exhibition of the
Deutsche Bank Art Collection at the
Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin on the occasion of its 25th birthday in
2005, and the exhibition
"Tokyo Blossoms" for the Deutsche Bank Art Collection, shown
this year at Tokyo’s
Hara Museum. Now, with the support of Deutsche Bank, the
Guggenheim Museum in New York is presenting a one-woman show from June 3
to October 25 2006 that illuminates the work of this exceptional architect
from the beginning or her career to the present day.
Anniversary exhibition of Deutsche Bank Art "25"
at Deutsche Guggenheim 2005
Photo:
Mathias Schormann
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Skulptures for "Tokyo Blossoms" in the
garden
of the Hara Museums in
Tokyo.
Photo: Katrin Paul
The large-scale retrospective also pays tribute to Hadid’s interdisciplinary
talent by focusing not only on her buildings, but also on the paintings,
sketches, architectural drawings, city planning, models, reliefs,
animation, furniture, and objects. The chronological order of the show
documents the phases in the professional life of the Iraq-born architect,
leading us back to Zaha Hadid the student, who was deeply inspired by the
social utopia of the
Russian Constructivists of the 1920s, and to her painting, in which she
investigated the potentials of three-dimensionality. Finally, the
exhibition traces her return to the architectural drawing, which she
liberated from the restrictive traditions of the
Cartesian system of coordinates.
The World (89 Degrees), 1983
Zaha
Hadid Architects
©Zaha Hadid,
Ltd., London
The system of coordinates
consisting of the x and y axes was developed in the 17th century by the
French philosopher René
Descartes; it proved unsuitable for calculating Hadid’s architectural
ideas and hindered her in her search for new possibilities to design
public space. As a consequence, she developed the concepts of "fluidity"
and "artificial landscape" to free herself from rationalist constraints.
Beyond the x and y axes, it was possible to develop an architecture
capable of penetrating into areas that had previously gone
architectonically unexplored. Painting also helped Hadid in this important
step, because it initially made it easier to defy gravity and the laws of
perspective.
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