Exhibition
Zaha Hadid
Architecture
MAK, Vienna
Photographed by Gerald Zugmann
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The exhibition is on view through August 17, 2003 "The most important thing is motion, the flux of things, a non-Euclidean geometry in which nothing repeats itself: a new order of space."
The focal center of the current Zaha Hadid exhibition is the spatial experiment "Ice-Storm" developed specifically for the MAK.
The installation, "Ice Storm" is the result of new digital potential that takes advantage of design and production practices so as to make innovative interior architecture comprehensible. As a built manifesto, Hadid integrated a series of early furniture designs and installations within it. She takes all of this, forming it into a dynamic, flowing spatial collage. Areas of semi-abstract forms and half-functional additions indicate a new kind of latent, rather than manifest, environment.
An essential element of the exhibition is the large number of mid-sized and large format paintings which have never been shown before and which the architect regards as the archive of her oeuvres.
While early works are still reliant on notions of deconstructionism, one can recognize a typical dynamism of form and color in the later Hadid's. The "major paintings" are not to be understood as concrete representations of architecture but as expressing perspectives, space, color, light and shadow with the aid of "multi-perspective projections." They reflect the mood of a particular project. Models, paintings, renderings, animations, and large-format photographs of buildings and projects both realized and still under construction provide a profound insight into Zaha Hadid's design practice in all phases of their development.
Four projects; the Science Center Wolfsburg, the Central Building of the new BMW plant in the north of Leipzig, the Bergisel Ski Jump in Innsbruck and the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, are comprehensively presented. In the field of architectural experimentation, Zaha Hadid has been a persistent radical for the last twenty years Ð a visionary, who breaks with conventional forms of building in an uncompromising way. Furthermore the significance of her contribution to present-day architecture can be deduced from a series of buildings which are as ground breaking as they are influential. The often long periods of development between abstract concept and feasible plan and its technical realization become understandable in the context of the MAK exhibition A book about Zaha Hadid's work Latent Utopias
How will we live in the future? What kinds of architecture can we anticipate? What will the workplace look like? Our homes? Every age has and needs its utopias. The grand social drafts of the past century have aroused suspicions toward the concept of utopia as a naive and perilous hubris. And yet the radical concepts of le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright displayed a force and rationality that can hardly be seen as a mistake. Latent Utopias features experimental architectural projects characterized by radical abstraction and strangeness. But what is the hidden meaning of these experiments? How does this "neo-avant-garde" relate itself to the historical avant-garde, and what is its stance on the idea of progress? Contrary to first appearances, is there still utopian potential? Latent Utopias suggests that there is still much we can learn from gazing into a perfect future.
Buy a book at Amazon.com through arcspace, and a small portion of the proceeds from your purchase will go to support our efforts to keep you informed. Gerald Zugmann July 7, 2003 |
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