Zaha Hadid is perhaps the most exciting event in contemporary architecture. Her irresistible imagination consistently expands the boundaries of what is possible in the theory and practice of architecture and urban planning. Her bold ideas have been dismissed as unrealizable fantasies for many years. Until recently, she managed to implement only a few small projects. The prestigious Pritzker Prize was awarded to her in 2004, mostly for paper projects, as a sign of hope that her visions will soon come true. The real shock befell many in 2006 during the personal exhibition of the architect at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, dedicated to the 30th anniversary of Hadid's career. Visitors to the exposition were greeted not just by games of bold imagination, but by a multimedia presentation with evidence of large-scale urban complexes under construction around the world.
Confidently and systematically, Zaha Hadid, with the projects of her bureau and the projects of an entire army of her followers, turns experimental organic, flexible and "unlimited" architecture into a mainstream reality. In addition to the already built Contemporary Art Centers in Cincinnati and Rome, the Innsbruck Ski Jump, the BMW plant in Leipzig and the Phaeno Science Center in Wolfsburg, Germany, a number of projects are under construction. Among them are the bridge in Abu Dhabi, the Opera House in Dubai and the Olympic Swimming Complex in London, which will be the first major project in the city in which our heroine has headed her bureau for 28 years.
She was born in Baghdad in 1950. She was educated by Catholic nuns in Baghdad, attended a private school in Switzerland and studied mathematics at the American University of Beirut (1968-1971). Zaha describes those times as very positive: “The sixties in the Arab world were an optimistic time. We believed in modernization, industrialization and looked to the West with hope … My father was a very high-ranking politician, one of the leaders of the Iraqi Democratic Party and the Minister of Finance and Industry. and he paid a lot of attention to the housing problem. In our family, we were all educated from this very worldview and have always believed in progress and education for women. Hadid graduated from the Architectural Association in London (1972 - 1977) and partnered with OMA (Office of Metropolitan) founders Ram Koolhaas and Elie Zengelis in London. In 1980, she opened her own office. Hadid is a frequent lecturer in Europe and the USA and is currently a professor at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna.
In April, I visited Hadid's office at 10 Bowling Green Lane in Clerkenwell in east London. It is housed in a former Victorian school building and consists of nine separate studios with unusually high ceilings. It employs 250 architects (this number has doubled in just the last couple of years). Our tête-à-tête interview was postponed and canceled over and over again in New York, London, New York again due to Zaha's very busy and constantly changing schedule. First, she was supposed to fly to the Middle East, then to Poland, then to Italy and a dozen other places. In the end, we agreed to conduct this interview via email.
You are engaged in several projects in Russia, including a private house, an office complex and a residential tower in Moscow. How did you receive these orders?
We won most of the orders as a result of international competitions, while in other cases our customers showed a personal interest in our architecture. We met a great understanding in Russia from customers. I am very impressed with their openness, desire to experiment, take risks, as well as the desire to turn the most fantastic projects into reality.
Tell us about the ideas that gave rise to the project of a private house near Moscow?
In my early projects, I was influenced by Russian constructivism (my graduation project "Tectonik Malevich", 1976-1977). This was the starting point of my personal creative path. Since then, my projects have become more fluid and organic. The Capital Hill Villa in Barvikha combines the directness and power of gesture of my early projects with the organic sophistication and expression of my later works.
The building is formed by two main forms. The lower part emerges from a naturally sloping landscape, among the beautiful birches and conifers that dot the entire site. This shape assimilates into the existing configuration of the site and fills it with floating terraces. The topography of the surrounding landscape is turned into the building, it articulates and is released back out into the natural environment. This two-way process dissolves the difference between interior and exterior and creates a sense of flow, which then rises vertically towards the second shape above. As a spatial antithesis, the upper form floats above the undulating crowns of a sea of 22 meters tall trees and allows you to enjoy endless views and follow the movement of the sun from sunrise to sunset. Connecting these two forms is a tilted structure, the transparency of which allows you to watch the dramatic rise of the elevator from the thick of the dark forest to the height of open and sun-drenched spaces.
How do you remember the house you grew up in?
In the suburbs of Baghdad, there was a beautiful green area with a lot of modernist private houses, our family had a very unusual house there, built in the 1930s, with expressive furniture of the mid-20th century. This house is still standing. I remember when I was seven years old, my parents and I went to Beirut to choose new furniture for our house. My father Mohammed Hadid was a very progressive man with cosmopolitan interests and in those years Baghdad was greatly influenced by modernism. Architects Frank Lloyd Wright and Joe Ponty implemented their projects there. I still remember going to the furniture store where we bought our new furniture. It was angular and modern, with liqueur-colored upholstery. And my parents bought an asymmetrical mirror for my room. I fell in love with him, and it was with him that my fascination with everything asymmetrical began. When we got home, I reorganized my room. In a moment, she turned from a little girl's room to a teenager's room. My cousin was very pleased with this setting, and she asked me to take care of her room. Then my aunt asked me to furnish her bedroom as well. This is how it all began. But it was my parents who instilled in me the desire to do all these things.
Where do you live in London?
I live in Clerkenwell, east London. My office has been there for over twenty years in an old Victorian school building. As our office grows, we occupy more and more space in this building. About two years ago, I moved closer to the office, as my old apartment was flooded while I was traveling, and I had to leave urgently. I have not designed anything in my current apartment, but it has a great advantage - it is much more spacious than the previous one, and you can find a place in it for my projects.
You often visit Moscow. This topic is of interest to many
Working in Russia is as difficult as it is in any other part of the international architectural landscape. In the case of Russia, and in particular in Moscow, the difficulty arises when the desire of customers to create innovative high-level architecture collides with well-established urban planning traditions. At the same time, there is another aspect - very harsh climatic conditions, especially in winter. Severe snowy winters are becoming very rare in the world, but in Russia they still exist - with a two-meter snow cover and 30-degree frosts.
What unique qualities of Moscow would you like to express in your architecture?
The scale of Moscow is incredible. It is one of the most exciting cities in the world. The scale of this metropolis is two or three times that of many of the largest cities. If you look at the city from the heights of the Lenin Hills, you will see that Stalin's skyscrapers reflect the Kremlin towers in their aesthetics, but on a larger scale. Much is being demolished and rebuilt there these days; they simply do not understand the value of many things.
The fact that my first projects were created under the influence of the early Russian avant-garde, especially the works of Kazimir Malevich, is indisputable. In the Russian avant-garde artists I was attracted by the spirit of courage, risk, innovation, striving for everything new and belief in the power of invention. Malevich was a pioneer of abstract art and a pioneer in his ability to combine abstract art with architecture. His dynamic balanced compositions of architectons were built on the principles of orthogonality from cubic volumes, touching surfaces, but not intersecting each other. Such restrictions are typical for many modern buildings in Moscow.
The Leonidov project of the Lenin Institute in 1927 was at least 50 years ahead of its time, and its competition project of the Ministry of Industry in 1934 - a composition of different towers growing from a single urban podium, still inspires urban planning projects. However, the most unusual thing about these projects was that they found themselves in the center of intense controversy in society, in academic circles, became the subject of exhibitions and open competitions.
These projects, despite all their experimental radicalism, had real social significance and political essence. One of the tasks that I set myself at the very beginning was to continue the unfinished project of Modernism in the experimental spirit of the early avant-garde. I'm talking about the radicality of some compositional techniques such as fragmentation and layering.
You have dreamed of becoming an architect since childhood. What influenced your passion for architecture and why did you decide to study mathematics in the beginning?
Before coming to London, I studied mathematics at the American University in Beirut, where I liked geometry. Now about hobbies. I was very attracted and attracted by the combination of logic and abstraction. The works of Malevich and Kandinsky combine these different concepts and add ideas of movement and energy to architecture, from where a sense of flow and movement in space arises.
Did you go to the Architectural Association because it is based in London or did you end up in London because of AA?
I came to London from Beirut specifically to study at AA. My brother told me that this is the best place to study architecture. It was a fantastic moment in the history of the Association. Alvin Boyarsky (a man of Russian roots) headed AA from 1971 to 1990. He instilled in the school a unique model of globalism. His visionary leadership allowed A. A. to become the first truly international school of architecture, to act as a catalyst for ideas from around the world. I am happy that I was there at that time.
What was your AA experience like?
At that time, A. A. was dominated by a sense of struggle and the desire to create anti-architecture. The popularity of postmodernism, historicism and rationalism served as a counterbalance to the ideas of modernization as we imagined it. Therefore, studying the pages of the history of Russian avant-garde architecture at the beginning of the 20th century, it was very interesting for me to discover new horizons and alternatives. As a naive student, I thought at the time that I was discovering something for the first time. It was very exciting.
A. A.'s experimentation was to confuse you in the first three years of study, and in the fourth year to assume that you have learned everything and are ready to independently choose your mentor and what your project will be. This taught me a lot. Ram, who was my project manager, always made fun of me. He said that if I could not explain to him what my project was about, he would take it away from me. I experienced a real shock when I finally understood what the teachers wanted from us.
To this I will add that Alvin Boyarsky fully supported our undertakings. We had no idea what we were following or what it might lead to, but we were sure that we were doing something real and productive.
You said your architecture is about experimenting and testing what is possible. How does your architecture progress over time?
My goal has always been to create fluid spaces and conditions under which they could be fully felt. In the beginning, my architecture was fragmented, not only because I tried to literally break the rules by which architecture was created, but also because we inherited such fragmentation from modernism and historic cities. Gradually, the process of various layers became more complicated. And for the past five years, I've tried to achieve both complexity and fluidity.
The goals are always changing. As our practice matures, we accumulate new points of reference, and our work becomes enriched, more complex and diversified due to our own resources and accumulated repertoire. I know from personal experience that some discoveries would never have happened without trying to untangle, decipher, explain or investigate something. Therefore, such a search and pursuit of something new is important, and even when you know that you have already discovered something, it turns out that the process of new discoveries is endless.
This answer is consonant with the opinion of Patrick Schumaker, Hadid's partner. In 2006, in New York, in the company of Zaha herself, he told me the following:
We have been working in the same paradigm for many years and all the time we continue to improve in the same direction. So, of course, we are progressing and we are getting better. We develop virtuosity by honing our techniques and ideas.
I am concerned about the issue of contextuality. Therefore, returning to the interview with Hadid, I remind her of her own words
You once remarked: "We work on a global scale and would like to refrain from speculative influence on our architecture of local national features. Any such speculation can only distract from our desire to express in architecture the essence of modernity of the new city." What conditions are important to you and what makes your architecture specific in response to a particular place or city?
We are always busy expanding our own repertoire and try to create different answers in different situations. But there are a number of principles that we strictly follow. One of them is to create the impression that our project is deeply and organically cut into the context with the help of a range of articulations and relationships - trying to adopt the features of the environment in such a way that in the end there is a sense of harmonious integration and entry into the context.
Project design may change as site surveys provide new insights. The ideal situation almost never happens in reality. We have learned to apply new methods in solving urban problems. We have created a number of projects in which various elements of buildings are combined to form a single extension together. We have even applied similar methods across entire cities. We can design a whole field of buildings, each different from the one standing next to it, but logically they will be connected to each other, forming an organic, continuously changing whole. Three or four types of buildings determine the basic relationships. Thus, we achieve the logical order of individual buildings and the elegance of a holistic composition. We draw inspiration from nature to create these examples of urban environments. It's hard to explain, it's not easy to understand. You need to see it.
Do you have a stunning surreal painting overlooking central London - Grand Buildings, 1985. Tell us how local conditions usually fuel your imagination to create such paintings? And how does a painting like this animate and reinvent the real site and what appears in its place?
The concrete result of my passion for Malevich was that I used painting as a design method. This way of expressing myself became my first territory for spatial inventions. I felt dissatisfied with the poverty of the traditional drawing system in architecture and tried to find new ways of representing.
It was painting that was the method that allowed me to experiment in the field of shaping and movement, which led to our radical approach in the development of a new architectural language. Painting is close to me, and it has always served as a kind of criticism of the methods of work that were at the disposal of designers. What I mean is that everything was projected through plan and section. Therefore, I resorted to painting, because I believed that the projections should have carried a certain amount of distortion, but in the end, this position, of course, influenced the projects themselves. My works became more viscous also because layering took place, like historical layers. When you put one layer on top of another, the most unusual things suddenly appear.
