Superstar architecture Zaha Hadid and the end of a brighter future
IN RUBRIC "HEROINE" We talk about women from different professional fields that inspire us with talent, lifestyle and dedication. In addition to our bold and energetic contemporaries, stories about great women of the past will appear here, but we will start with a name that has been synonymous with the rapidly advancing future for the last ten years.
When Zaha Hadid became the first woman to win the Pritzker Prize in 2004, she hardly collected five modest buildings. Ten years later, under the leadership of Hadid, an army of 500 architects works, who each year produce five spectacular buildings in different parts of the world, and her figure is mentioned more often in the press than the name of the new Pritzker Japanese winner Shigeru Ban. Hadid - the main and most massive architect on the planet, without any indulgent supplement "-woman", implying that she is an exception in the world of men. But in 2014, something in this status is wrong.
This summer, opening a new building in Hong Kong, Zaha Hadid looked like a triumph. The curved aluminum innovation tower of the local technology university, sandwiched between the highway overpasses and the faceless high-rise buildings of southern Kowloon, would have seemed alien in any environment. Whether the rock washed by the sea, or the spacecraft that would fit the jockeys from Prometheus Ridley Scott - its buildings look like advanced technological products, big gadgets, pieces of which were perfectly calculated on the computer of the future, suddenly found themselves on an imperfect planet. But this was not the reason for the triumph - not the building, but the city itself. Two-thirds of her career, Zaha Hadid was a paper architect, popular only among critics. The culprit for her deferred success was Hong Kong.
Hadid had no complicated biography. She was born in 1950 in Iraq in the family of a rich and pro-European industrialist. She lived in one of the first modernist houses in Baghdad, which became for her a symbol of progressive views and engendered a love for architecture. After school, she went to study math in Beirut, from there to London, and never really returned to her homeland. In the UK, she enrolled in an architectural school, where the great Dutchman Rem Koolhas became her mentor. Like the teacher, she adored the Russian avant-garde: her graduation project of a hotel-bridge over the Thames in 1977 was one big reference to Malevich. Hadid was so gifted that Koolhas called it "a planet in his own orbit", and immediately after leaving school he took a partner in the OMA bureau. Three years later she will leave to begin her practice.
Hadid won her first competition in Hong Kong - in 1982 with a draft sports club on top of one of the local mountains. Her proposal - a Suprematist composition rejecting gravity - brought Hadid fame among specialists. It could have launched her career, but this did not happen: the club was not built, only beautiful axonometry remained from the project. Paradoxically, the reason was not the technical difficulties or the radicalism of the project, but the beginning discussion of the upcoming transfer of the city from Great Britain to China. The risks of loss of Hong Kong freedom were so strong that a year later the customer chose to cancel the construction. Hadid returned to London and opened an office with money from the competition.
At that time another British was in Hong Kong - in the same year Norman Foster began construction of the HSBC bank in the city. He wrapped the foreign risks in his favor: his skyscraper was coined as a huge folding designer, which, if necessary, could be taken apart and transported to another place. Completed three years later, the high-rise brought Foster international success and, together with the London building of Lloyd Richard Rogers, launched an architectural fashion for high-tech. By the end of the 1990s, it was Foster who became perhaps the main architectural star on the planet. And Hadid and worked in the table.
It built the first building only ten years later, in 1993, a small fire station for the furniture company Vitra, which with its flying visor-wing could easily have passed for the pavilion of the Soviet avant-garde works of the 1920s. A couple of years later she won the competition for the creation of an opera in Cardiff three times, but it was not built. Before receiving the Pritzker, Hadid had one serious job at all — the Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art in provincial Cincinnati, completed a year before the award, named, however, the most important new building in the United States since the end of the Cold War.
In hindsight, it would seem that the award of Zaha Hadid was a political decision of the Pritzker jury. Imagine: an avant-gardist with unlimited imagination, a woman in the male profession (not the only one - in the mid-1990s, the French woman Odile Dek had already become famous, but what a difference), besides from a third world country. But, rather, the award was issued in advance - with the hope that it will rethink the language of modern architecture. Since 1997, when Frank Gehry opened the deconstructive museum of Guggenheim in Bilbao, the world has been overwhelmed with fashion for world-famous superstar architects who have become heroes of popular culture. Hadid was supposed to be the most distinctive of them. And it became: in 2010 and 2011, she won the prestigious British Stirling Award for buildings of the National Museum of Art of the 21st Century in Rome and Evelyn Grace High School in London twice in a row. The MAXXI museum located in the north of Rome is the opus magnum of Hadid, to which she walked for three decades. Now Hadid no longer cares about deconstruction: from the mid-2000s, its buildings have smooth shapes, and their design is calculated on a computer as a complex equation connecting all parts of a building. For the latter is responsible co-author Hadid and director of her bureau Patrick Schumacher, who is the main theorist of parametric architecture. Working at the table, they waited for technology to bring their imagination to life, and they waited.
The insides of the MAXXI are either the intestines of a strange animal, or the course of an underground river that washes out its way through the strata of reinforced concrete. If the modernist architecture of the 20th century aspired to the sky and was clearly airy, then the architecture of Hadid is “water”, it lives in a world without gravity, and its conditional spaces without floor and ceiling flow into each other. There is something oriental in this, as if Hadid recalls his native culture and draws projects as Arabic calligraphy. Is it original? Highly. The problem is that, becoming a mass, this architecture becomes predictable in its unusualness. She is so unusual and so alien to Europeans that all the time she looks at one person, as if Hadid comes up with the same thing over and over again. Moreover, it turns out that this distinctive architecture is not so difficult to copy: in China, the British already had pirates.
Accusations of self-repetition is not the worst. Transformed from a paper architect to a mass architect, Zaha Hadid was trapped: she became a fashionable architect-superstar exactly when the fashion for such stars began to decline. It turned out that the Bilbao effect does not work; after the 2008 recession, leftism, thriftiness and a social approach are in fashion. The buildings of Hadid are the exact opposite: in 2014 she was criticized for the fact that the space in her buildings was used inefficiently, that her work was expensive to build and more expensive to maintain, that she was building everywhere, especially in China and the oil despots of the Middle East, where human rights.
She is blamed by workers who are dying on the construction of a vagina-like stadium in Qatar. In response, Hadid and Schumacher say that the architect should not think about social justice, he should do his job well. They say that their unusual spaces change communication between people and that thanks to these buildings, society will become more progressive and more humane in the future. They do not really believe, and the Pritzker jury, as if in jest, gives a new prize to the Japanese, who build temporary cardboard houses for refugees and earthquake victims.
However, Hadid herself is not to blame. Throughout the past century, avant-garde architects did not sell buildings, but hope for progress and memories of a bright future. But technical progress does not guarantee social justice, and at the beginning of the 21st century, humanity experienced a crisis of faith. Nobody flew to explore distant planets, there is no unexpected future - there is only a little more green and efficient present with advanced gadgets. Zaha Hadid had been an avant-garde architect all her life, but now she has nothing more to sell. In 2014, its unusual buildings are just buildings.
Little is known about Zaha Hadid’s personal life and views. She has a complex character, she is emotional and impatient, but she is unlikely to refuse her charisma. She promised never to build prisons - "even if they are the most luxurious prisons in the world." Because of her career, she never married. She does not have kids. She says she would like them, but, apparently, in another life. Hadid calls himself a Muslim, but not to believe in God. She does not consider herself a feminist, but she is glad that her example has inspired many people around the world. She is confident that women are smart and strong.
The apartment of Zaha Hadid is not far from the office in Clerkenwell, London, and judging by what people have said there, this is a surgically clean space, filled with avant-garde furniture. White, faceless and soulless - not so much a house as a temporary and uninhabited shelter. Hadid drives a BMW, loves the Comme des Garçons, sometimes watches "Mad Men", too often he looks into his phone. She has no privacy - she has projects.
This year, Zaha Hadid for the sixth time hit the shortlist for the Stirling Prize for the Aquatics Center, built for the 2012 London Olympics. Despite criticism in the press, next year it will open five more iconic buildings in different parts of the world, and in a year five more, and it will almost certainly be nominated for the seventh, eighth and millionth time. A month later, Hadid turns 64 years old, her partner Patrick Schumacher is only 52, almost nothing by the standards of the industry. Their bureau is loaded with work for the decade ahead. There is no bright future, but they are still ahead.
Photo: Zaha Hadid Architects
