The Functional Rationality of Zaha Hadid’s Radical Formal Innovations
Patrik Schumacher, London 2019
Published in: Ursula Schwitella (Editor), Women in Architecture - Past, Present and Future, Hatje Cantz Publishers, Berlin 2021
The formal innovations from the 1980s and 1990s owe much to the radical formal iconoclast innovations delivered by the early work of Zaha Hadid. What were the major expansionary moves that Zaha gifted to our discipline? We can identify and distinguish four wholly original and empowering ‘discoveries’: Explosion, Calligraphy, Distortion, and Landscape. The design moves indicated by these concepts were so radical that they seemed utterly surreal or absurd at first. (I guess that’s why nobody else had ever hit upon them before.) They are formal repertoire expansions, and thus might initially viewed as artistic moves, and indeed they first showed up in Zaha’s often conceptual, rather obscure, seemingly utterly abstract drawings and paintings. However, in the hands of a designing architect a formal repertoire is always also a problem solving repertoire, addressing the problems of spatial organisation and morphological articulation in the service of the prospective building’s social and technical functioning. An expanded formal repertoire thus delivers an enriched problem solving tool box. So we need to grasp and discuss the new moves together with their empowering affordances, affordances that are indeed congenial to the requirements and desires of our time, and are thus potentially able to deliver momentous advantages. Of course, we should not expect these advantages to become fully manifest in the early explorations, but they have started to become manifest in our major mature works of recent years (and I argue they promise further compelling manifestations):
Explosion: The surreal move to treat explosion as a compositional move soon reveals its power when a plan is no longer a closed and rigid array of nested boxes but a centrifugal force-field that is eminently permeable, varied, yet ordered through the directed and progressive expansion of all fragments in relation to the implied point of origin. This dynamic and lawful fragmentation of the plan was a decisive step forward from the random, disordered fragmentation proposed by deconstructivism. However, the explosion delivers more order than just random fragmentation. It delivers a lawfully differentiated field where the fragments’ directionality points back to the shared origin and where the increasing spacing of fragments also indicates the relative position in the field.
Zaha Hadid, Sketch of Explosion – For Eaton Place Residence, 1980
This sketch is one of Zaha’s personal favorites. It expresses her idea of exploding the usual bounded, cellular order of architecture. The explosion delivers porosity and thus intercommunication between all spaces. It also delivers variety and informality. However, the result is not random but offers a certain spatial order, a centrifugal patterning of relations.
Zaha Hadid Architects, sketch for Hamburg Hafenstrasse, 1989. The sketch visualizes the concept of breaking through the linear, closed order of the waterfront city fabric.
Zaha Hadid Architects, painting for Victoria Areal Competition, Berlin 1988. The sketch visualizes the concept of exploding the typical Berlin urban block, creating a three-dimensional porosity where the visual space opens up in all directions: above, below and all around, in layers.
Zaha Hadid Architects, painting ‘Vision for Madrid’, 1992. The painting illustrates the evolution of Madid as a slow motion explosion, as a series of expansions, breaking city walls. ZHA’s Vision continues the explosion on an accelerating trajectory, proposing a linear city expanding towards the airport.
Zaha Hadid Architects, MAXXI Museum for Art and Architecture of the 21st Century, Rome 1999-2010.
Suspended in space, as if Inhabiting the centre of an explosion, with movement and exploration potential all around. This is the empowering experience we wish to deliver with our architecture: The space of flying.
Calligraphy: The surreal move of translating the dynamism of rapid calligraphic sketching literally (by hard-lining them with the use of an expansive range of ‘French curves’ or ‘ship curves’) into an architectural drawing that is then read as an intended geometry to be built, rather than treating the pulsing curvature of a rapid sketch as a rough accidental indication of an ideal geometric form meant to be rationalized into straight lines and arcs. Zaha’s intricately variegated curves offer more adaptive versatility to push into irregular sites or bulge to give room to internal requirements where needed. Further, as a function of the changing centrifugal force of the rapid hand’s/pen’s acceleration and deceleration, the curves and curvelinear compositions display lawful and coherent trajectories that we can recognize as coherent and legible figures, each with its own poise, dynamism or degree of fluidity. This increases legibility and navigability in the face of unavoidable programmatic diversity and complexity.
Zaha Hadid, abstract sketch without determinate project relation, about 2005. The sketch demonstrates the new degrees of organisational freedom that calligraphic sketching can conquer for architecture. The sketch also shows how the rapid hand movement gives lawful variation to the lines. The sketch further demonstrates how curvature allow us to maintain legibility in the face of complexity.
Zaha Hadid, plan drawing for Cathcart Road Interior project, London 1987. The project is one of Zaha Hadid’s earliest 100% projects predominantly based on curves with continuously varying radii. It is a good example of her architectural calligraphy.
Zaha Hadid, sketch of Greater London city scape, 1988. Urban Calligraphy: calligraphic fluidity explored on an urban scale. The dynamic pulsating line of the river gives shape and character to the city. Accordingly the urban grid deforms dynamically.
Zaha Hadid Architects, MAXXI Museum for Art and Architecture of the 21st Century, Rome 1999-2010. The freedom of the calligraphic hand and its faithful translation demonstrates its empowering adaptive versatility in this winning scheme and in its final realization.
Distortion: The surreal move of using perspectival projection not to depict regular forms but to create and posit distorted forms. Zaha built up pictorial spaces within which multiple perspective constructions were fused into a seamless dynamic texture. One way to understand these images is as attempts to emulate the experience of moving through an architectural composition revealing a succession of rather different points of view. Another, more radical way of reading these canvasses is to abstract from the implied views and to read the distorted forms as a peculiar architectural world in its own right with its own characteristic forms, compositional laws and spatial effects. Usually these compositions are poly-central and multi-directional. All these features are the result of the use of multiple, interpenetrating perspective projections. Often the dynamic intensity of the overall field is increased by using curved instead of straight projection lines. The projective geometry allows us to bring an arbitrarily large and diverse set of elements under its cohering law of diminution and distortion. The resultant graphic space very much anticipates the later (and still very much current) concepts of field and swarm. The effect achieved is very much like the effects later pursuit with digitally simulated “gravitational fields” that distort a mesh or grip, align, orient and thus integrate a set of elements or particles within the digital model.
Zaha Hadid Architects, Vitra Firestation, Weil am Rhein, 1989-1993. This design utilizes isometric and well as perspectival distortion as design move that help fitting the project into a contextual trajectory and that deliver observer dependent visual effects that animate the spatial experience.
Zaha Hadid Architects, sketch model for Doha Museum of Islamic Art Competition, 1995. The project uses perspectival distortion, here with curved projection lines, and diminution towards an implied vanishing point. This unifies a whole swarm of elements and broadly orders them according to size. The project is also an example of the architectural utilization of the landscape analogy.
Landscape: Instead of dissecting and ordering space by walls the landscape analogy suggests a continuously flowing space where transitions are soft, where zones are gradually differentiated and bleed into each other, where a smooth topographic ground relief rather than hard edges structure spatial relations. This opens up a whole new ontology of spatial and territorial definition, no longer premised on outline but on a modulated internal texture. We are talking of fields rather than spaces. In contrast to (empty ) spaces, fields (like a forest) are full, filled with a modulated medium, i.e. structured via continuously differentiated field conditions and thus navigation can follow various vectors of gradual field transformation like density or directionality, rather than only orienting by tracking boundary crossings. Zaha’s painterly techniques like color modulations, fading effects and pointillism techniques also reinforce this new ontology of blurred boundaries and soft transitions, which is congenial to the contemporary social life and institutions where the formerly strict distinction of social classes and arenas are blurred and where domains of competency interpenetrate and bleed into each other.
Zaha Hadid Architects, sketch for the Quebec National Library in Montreal, 1997. The design employs the landscape analogy to reinvent the internal organization of an urban block. The project proposes a series of terraced “valleys” that hold the books and articulate reading theatres.
Zaha Hadid Architects, Land Formation One, exhibition building, Weil am Rhein, 1997-1999. This is our first built project that uses the landscape analogy. Slopes and curves embed the building into the park scape.
Zaha Hadid Architects, Dong Daemon Design Plaza and Park, Seoul 2007-2013. This project displays the versatility of the calligraphic freedom whereby the outline of the project can fit itself into an irregularly shaped site. The landscape analogy becomes nearly literal as park and building interweave and fuse into a coherent, continuous spatial system.
Through these congenial and empowering repertoire expansions a new language of architecture with a much increased versatility (and thus problem solving capacity), and with a much richer, more expressive and more communicative repertoire of organisation and articulation (and thus ordering capacity) was born. The writings of the American formalists (Kipnis, Lynn etc.) delivered a congenial terminology for the verbal articulation of our work. This explicit conceptual articulation is important as it focusses attention and directs the further innovative thrust. The relationship between theory and creative practice is a progressive dialectical back and forth rather than a hierarchical sequence.
End.