#Zaha Hadid

[allthingsfern]

Cascading VII. Miami, 05-27-24.

[zegalba]

Zaha Hadid: Chair 'Liquid Glacial' Smoke (2015)

[cloehotham]

London Aquatics Centre, Stratford

[byseanbrown]

[danielgianfranceschi]

Museo MAXXI, Roma, Zaha Hadid

[matthiasheiderich]

Vitra Feuerwehrhaus, Zaha Hadid. Photo: Matthias Heiderich

[fashionlandscapeblog]

Zaha Hadid Architects

Changsha Meixihu International Culture and Art Centre, China, 2019

Image: Source

[carmen-art]

Masaryčka Building by Zaha Hadid - Prague 2024

[sorrysomethingwentwrong]

"Marco Marilungo Pictor" Art

[jinsei-pika-pika]

Zaha Hadid "Leeza Soho Tower" photographed by Satoshi Ohashi

[allthingsfern]

Cascading VIII. Miami, 05-27-24.

[zegalba]

Zaha Hadid: Chair 'Liquid Glacial' (2015)

[germanpostwarmodern]

Zaha Hadid throughout her career pushed the boundaries of architecture: defying conventions Hadid pursued her very own idea of architecture as a flow of space. Although she operated in the context of the digital turn, her calligraphic drawings remained an analog basis of her work, just like her even more spectacular paintings: already during her student days at Architectural Association London she started painting as a means to explore the spatial potency of architecture. At the same time it offered the opportunity to work out spatial „grafting“ as introduced by her teachers Rem Koolhaas and Elia Zenghelis, a method that establishes both spatial and representational constructs that Hadid realized in the painting „Malevich’s Tektonik“ and the painting related to 59 Eaton Place.

Through the years her paintings went through different transformations but continued to remain an essential tool in the development of her architectural vision. In her recently published book „Zaha Hadid’s Paintings - Imagining Architecture“ scholar Desley Luscombe follows this development and provides in-depth analyses of key paintings and how they relate to Hadid’s architecture. Proceeding from the aforementioned early paintings Luscombe in six chapters e.g. covers „Grand Buildings“ from the mid 1980s and Hadid’s engagement with the urban character of London, the Berlin project for an office building on Kurfürstendamm and ultimately the MAXXI in Rome. In each of the chapters the author elaborates on the manifold aspects that informed the paintings, e.g. layered, relational architectural ideas, precedent images by, among others, Malevich and El Lissitzky, as well as the painterly implications directed at the viewer and his/her activation and interpretation. In so doing Luscombe achieves detailed analyses that pay as much attention to the autonomous artwork as they do to its architectural dimension, an approach that brings the reader closer to understanding the purpose of painting in Hadid’s oeuvre: in painting, just like the Suprematists, she used the pictorial space to investigate topics like the spatiality of urban experiences, the role of architecture in the city or the very nature of the architectural program. Accordingly, they go well beyond a concrete, realizable building and very much distill theoretical thoughts about architecture and urbanism into series of paintings.

With Luscombe’s book Zaha Hadid’s paintings finally receive a proper scientific analysis that convincingly explains their meaning and function within the architect’s complex oeuvre. An eye-opening read!

[byseanbrown]

[kobikiyama]

Lois & Richard Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art / 2003

Zaha Hadid

[matthiasheiderich]

Vitra Feuerwehrhaus by Zaha Hadid (1990-1993). Photo: Matthias Heiderich