Johnathan Meade’s excellent article is a sort of intellectual dissection of Zaha Hadid. He does this, as discussed, through the examination of a number of agendas that contribute to the zaha amalgam.Context seems to me to be the most interesting and important question, whether it’s the physical environment into which her buildings are dropped, the social context of the architectural world, or the places where she lives and works. Her designs are so outrageously extreme I think this is a valid subject to address.
This render of a competition entry she did for the Centre for Islamic Art in the Cour Visconti at the Louvre is a prime example, the shape of the intervention is so far removed from the existing courtyard that it isn’t easy to see how it was born. However, her buildings are, as Meades says, sensitive to their surroundings. She is not drawing forms directly from the surrounding landscape rather making an intervention into the existing space to make a better and more exciting use of that space. There is further context in this design in the geometrical patterns of the cladding, an acknowledgment of what lies within. So she may appear to be ‘anti-contextual’, but in reality the designs still need to come from somewhere.
No comments:
Post a Comment