Architecture
Zaha Hadid (Institute of Contemporary Arts, London SW1, till 10 September)
The ethics of aesthetics
Alan Powers
In the past ten years, a great deal of modern architecture has become palatable and unobjectionable, even when gherkin- flavoured and oversized, like Norman Fos- ter's proposed city office building for Swiss Re. Yet the desire that has been growing during the same period to assimilate archi- tecture to artistic culture in general has meant that it wants its own avant-garde. If anyone represents that avant-garde in Britain, it is not Foster or Rogers but Zaha Hadid, whose work is on exhibition at the ICA, and included in the selection of four architects as 'Four City Visionaries', for the British Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale (till 29 October).
Architects habitually return to the early 1920s in Europe as a period genuinely fer- tile in new ideas, in a way that has never since been equalled. Very few of these ideas were actually realised in buildings, so they have not suffered the sometimes chill- ing effect of material reality. Hadid is now poised on the brink between fame based entirely on unbuilt projects and the exciting but potentially dangerous outcome of hav- ing her designs built. She missed a chance to build the Cardiff Bay Opera House when the competition collapsed in fiasco following her win in 1994. The ICA exhibi- tion shows projects since this date, only two of the smallest so far built, both in the tiny German/Swiss border town of Well am Rhein. Hadid's 'Mind Zone' is on show at the Millennium Dome. All these are too small to give a proper representation of her ideas, but her Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati is due to be completed in 2002, and the Centre for Contemporary Arts in Rome in 2005.
Hadid became famous as a student at the Architectural Association in the 1970s, when old modernism, which had pushed rationality to the edge of madness, was dying and a new form of madness, involv- ing indecipherable architectural renderings of ideas which were never quite buildings, became the purest and most uncorrupt form of post-modernism. Her work relates to the Russian revolutionary avant-garde, whose ideas were the most extreme and in many ways the most poetic of the early Modern Movement, often defying gravity and the Cartesian organisation of space with a fiercely spiritual expression. It is interesting that her early projects earned her the blessing of Berthold Lubetkin, an architect with roots in the Russian revolu- tion who walked a tightrope between ratio- nality and poetic madness in England in the 1930s and 1950s. Of the works in the exhibition, the one which is most symbolic of her intentions and most easily under- stood is a ski jump at Innsbruck (1999), incorporating a restaurant. It is an elegant sculptural object set among mountains, devoted to pleasure and movement at speed. As the critic Brian Hatton writes in an entertaining essay which comes as an insert in the illustrated catalogue, 'Hadid . . works on a globe transformed, but not abolished by capitalism, a world which, superficially at least, resembles the secular utopia of the Russian revolution where the goods of modern life would be available to all, with no guilty memories of the past.'
Mountains are an important metaphor for Hadid. She came to international notice with a competition project for a nightclub on a mountain above Hong Kong in 1983. Where they do not exist, she invents them through the adoption of high viewpoints on her projects, or occasionally views from an imaginary below. Her `Z-scape' furniture in the exhibition is like fissured strata, with sofas called 'moraine' and 'glacier'. Move- ment, exemplified in the trajectory of the ski-jumper, is also an essential aspect of her work, which leans and bends as if blown by invisible winds, and consists not of rooms but of corridors. A project for a road bridge over Holloway Road for the University of North London (1998) is a good example of a movement diagram turned into a built form, but the same idea is at the basis of all her work.
The idea of a building that is not a build- ing, but a series of lines in space is an attractive one, resembling a child's game of cat's cradle, where a ball of string or coloured wool is stretched around a room, pulled taut from one fastening point to another, making a cage of space. I used to 'Quick, grab his wallet, some guys on horses are coming.' play this game, and I wonder whether the young Hadid did the same, since this is the technique she has used at an outdoor scale in a current installation in the gardens of the Villa Medici in Rome. There is a simi- lar pleasure to be had in exploring all the ramparts, passageways and dungeons of a castle.
The Venice Architecture Biennale carries the slogan 'Less Aesthetics, More Ethics'. It is divisive and smug and could only be applied to Hadid's work in order to deni- grate it as aesthetics. I would like to believe that her work is not just the product of a self-regarding avant-garde, as some have claimed, but will actually show how strange beauty has its own ethical purpose.
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