Zaha Hadid Is The Future Architecture Cultural Studies Essay

Currently there are a lot of new buildings that have strong futuristic appearance and inspiring features, represent tomorrows skyline. The rapid development of technology like hybrid cars, slim size computers and advance communication gadgets has certainly shown us new heights of transformation.

The influenced of architecture has come to its light. Imaginary arts and craft based on fictional space movies and illustrations have come a long way to introduced and to be recognized for its rare platonic solids and geometry constructions. The society is getting more positive and acceptance with the growth of new technology and high development futures. The world is evolving to a new era and by tomorrow there will be more of these buildings appearing as part of the city infrastructure.

The architect Zaha Hadid or Dame Zaha Mohammad Hadid who is well known for her intense de-constructivist designs and neo-modernist designs in the architecture industry. Her designs are similar to Sci-Fi movies that create forms of morph, shape change geometries and breaking the rules of space.

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She emphasized her work based upon the concept of de-constructivist designs on a prism shape that in-cooperates between interior and exterior influences. The overall form is based on cutting away or reshaping the surface to look like a deform prism or crystal debris. It is therefore resurrecting a historical element that had become largely absent from the ‘square’. This is how she would choose her earlier designs to look like.

The rapid developments from big cities in England, America and China may have some strong appraisal for Zaha Hadid’s creations and attracted many to her concepts of a new city infrastructure should have and in-cooperated for the future. Previously, huge events like the Beijing’s Olympics and the Shanghai Expo has proven her design is necessary for a new horizon. Her works is the result of that imagination, her structures can be empathized only as a fragment of a new continuous pattern and that is finally getting paid worthy of her effort.

She had introduced some alternatives and new concepts in architecture to the world and may be accepted by many who like her works but there are some may find it rather less institutional, lavishly expensive to the cost and the commissions she is getting. She only interested in the onetime ‘wow’ factor as a signature creation than thinking about the effectiveness and the long run purpose of the building. Her critics mentioned her work as a ‘design blunder’ for the London Aquatic Center and her success with the ‘Cardiff Bay Opera House’ competition was unpleasantly “re-evaluated” immediately after an outrage to the idea of building it. She may be a good designer with sense of creativity for a specific culture but this culture is limited to certain things.

Her works were compared with Michael Hopkins’ Velodrome versus the London Aquatics Centre that has drawn some attention about her design flaws. The Velodrome was developed through a near hostile approach; it synchronized slowly with the people’s input by various members in a multi level ‘integrated design team’ which combined the inputs of others.

Perhaps though a point where the despite disparities of architecture developments and lack of fairness for those may have some differences. Thus without claiming the full ‘universality’ in design culture, I am inclined to see patterns that insist on comparison, and hence on explorations of the linkages between futuristic designs, society experience and normative mores across boundaries between their struggles and success. At least in the early modernity of this new architecture era, the connections seem to me compelling.

(History)

Here is a little history about her background as she would mature and be one of the many architects in the deconstructivist movement. Architect Zaha Hadid is not only the first female and a foreign Muslim woman, and also a winner of the Pritzker Architecture Prize which is equivalent the Nobel Prize in architecture, an award can only takes a life time to archive for architects. She ranked 69th in the Forbes magazine and enlisted as one of “The world’s 100 most powerful women”. After winning the Pritzker prize she still has a lot to struggle with her own hands when it comes to some projects. 

In her last 15 years, there has been some tremendous change and now it seems as normal to have women in this profession but still very difficult for women to operate in this profession because there are some worlds are limited for them to access. She experienced resistance but she kept on her own path, her direction and her focus on her long run ambition as an architect.

Zaha Hadid from Baghdad, born in the year 1950, she grew together in a very peaceful and developing Iraq, not from the one we known of today. The Iraq of her childhood days was a wonderful place, western-oriented country with a growing economy that flourished until the year 1963, Ba’ath politics took over the government and her father was a wealthy politician, economist and industrialist and at that time, a co-founder for the National Democratic Party of Iraq.

Her father taught her cultures of the world while always reminding the significance of her traditions and her heritage. He used and learned this through at the London School of Economics and joined forces with the resistant party against foreign occupation.

His political views on the industrialization economy of Iraq, property issues and the nationalization of the country’s oil have influenced her thoughts of the world. Her childhood experiences brought her to belief in open communication between people, but also a conviction in Iraqi’s freedom.

She was proud of her father’s achievements and there is no reason why she would not be equally ambitious just like her father. In the past, female role models were plenty in Iraq, but in architecture, in the Middle East, there were none in the 1950s to the 1960s.

She was educated in Baghdad in a school run by French Roman Catholics, and continued part of her secondary education years in Switzerland and The Great Britain. During her elementary education, she mixed with different cultures. She attended a nun school with Christian, Jewish, and Islamic girls but this is the first indication of a cultural exchange for her. She felt separated from her traditions because of her Christianity education. She never had proper religious schooling as a Muslim. Education in Arab countries, Islam or Arab culture is the same, it is only a cultural differences.

Zaha Hadid became interested in architecture at the age of eleven, although she would pursue her other academic education. A family friend was working on a housing project for her relatives and would bring models to show her. Her parents thought she would like to see more arts and craft by taking her to architecture exhibitions in her childhood days. The mixed between Arab and Western influences, she developed her personal interest towards architecture.

She returned to the Middle East to continue her education at the American University in Beirut from 1968 to 1971 and studied related subjects of physics, modern mathematics, math, and philosophy, shortly before she studied architecture. She returned back to Britain and in 1977 she then received a diploma from the Architectural Association (AA) in London.

The Architectural Association (AA) in London in the 70’s was a good environment for young, ambitious and independent architects. This particular area becomes a very solid foundation for architects to grow and to achieve their success; this is where famous architects got their education and the place in which her academic refinement began developing from 1972 and to the next 5 years. During her years at AA she had more time to expand her ideas and creating her own architectural methods. People like Bernard Tschumi and Daniel Libeskind are big names of today’s award winning architect designers. While there, she studied with Rem Koolhaas, Elia Zenghelis, Daniel Libe-skind, and Bernard Tschumi and among others.

In the early 1968, optimistic modernism was abandoned and was caused by the economic uncertainty and cultural issues. The architecture industry was affected too. Rem Koolhaas founded OMA in 1975 together with others, like Elia Zenghelis, Zoe Zenghelis and (Koolhaas’s wife) Madelon Vriesendorp in London. After that, Koolhaas recruited his student as a partner was Zaha Hadid who would eventually achieved her own success later in life. Koolhaas offered her a job working with them in his new firm, the ‘Office for Metropolitan Architecture’ or OMA. But she didn’t last very long working for them.

The relation Zaha Hadid with OMA was more of a fundamental level than working as a team with them. There was almost a kind of no dialogue basis between them. They did support her when she needed guidance.” Koolhaas did serve as a mentor and a friend. As her former tutor, he could appreciate her style of work and the thoughts she had when she was still in AA.

She obviously respects his opinions, comments and values his friendship when she was still his student. Koolhaas reviewed her as “a planet orbiting in her own way”. She had her thoughts about architecture and waiting for the right time to ripe. This relationship soon became too restrictive for her, although she and Koolhaas remained close friends.

Soon after that, she taught at AA and until 1987 she led her own studio. She started teaching while developing her own visions of neo-modernist architecture, which referred back to modernism’s times in the constructivism and suprematism from the early 20th century of architecture.

Her final graduation hotel project at London’s Hungerford Bridge was motivated by Malevich’s Tectonik. Written in the year 1928 after the suprematist, Kasimir Malevich wrote “we only recognized space when we are separated from the ground, to a state of mind, where there is no more constraints to retain.” her works were inspired by these words and from then onwards her creations become landscapes which metaphorically transformed her way of thinking design, literally this would be today’s reality.

She formed and founded Zaha Hadid Architects ‘ZHA’ in 1980. She has gone to produce internationally acclaimed award winning designs for structure buildings and interiors around the world. Zaha Hadid was hired to teach in a number of institutions. The year 1994 she was teaching in 3 different institutions in the United States: the Kenzo Tange Chair at Harvard University’s School of Design, University of Illinois’s School of Architecture, the Sullivan Chair, and the Master Studio at Columbia University. Since then, the prominent University for Applied Arts has appointed her as professor in Vienna, Austria in the year 2001.

(Theoritical)

Zaha Hadid obsession with shadows and light rooted from the Islam architecture, while its flows openly, charging forward like an ocean bed and crash to impact, deforming a metaphor tsunami, together with an unbalance of modern urban landscapes. All of this would have been impossible without the support through computer technology, architects given the endless possibility creating any shapes they want to have. Such extreme rhythm of shapes required significant investment and time, financially and engineering capabilities. Her style has been described as today’s De-constructivist and Neo-modernist. In the Britain’s Design Museum discussed her work referring to baroque modernism.

Like Francesco Borromini’s Baroque classicists ‘demolished ideas of Renaissance, using a single perception that desire for an unstable nature’. Zaha Hadid against both the classically rules, modernism references from Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier and the rules of architecture space. She would reconstruct the idea to what she said as “a new fluid, kind of spatiality of design” of multiple perspective points and fragmented mesh geometries, designed to attach the chaotic forms of modern living quarters.

Perhaps her style was partially inspired by her tutor’s work, when Zaha Hadid graduated in 1977, Rem Koolhaas offered her a job but she didn’t last long. If she got attracted to any of the tutors in her past, it was Rem Koolhaas, he was writing his books for the 1977’s ‘Delirious New York’ and working his ‘neo-modernity’ ideas.

This has set Rem Koolhaas’s career and he described the “a desire” for a change in city living: “The environment is an obsessive high-tech city which is inescapable” in his book. He explained the city was a group of “red hot spots.” He acknowledged that this method had already been proven in the Japanese Metabolist Movement from the 1960s to the 1970s.

(Contextual / Asia Design Movement)

The scheme for The Peak in Hong Kong 1983 marked a shift in her ability to sense certainties from her past, the resistance between the complexity of order and chaos. Her passion remains in her work, creating abstract architectures. Her works were recognized and accepted in Asia, this all started from her first encounter of a project that signaled her breakthrough in the year 1983. The Hong Kong competition project was ‘The Peak’, a sports club and she won first place for the competition entry in The Peak project.

Her contest scheme was discarded by some technical reasons, but a late judge pulled it back from the disqualified submissions. The scheme was to feature a sports center with multiple floors; however it was never build because the developer went bankrupted after the incident. The building from Weil-am-Rhein in Germany, or known as the The Vitra fire station completed in the year 1993 was Zaha Hadid’s first project, which later converted in to a museum.

In the year 2002, she designed the Hoenheim-North Terminus and Car Park at Strasbourg, France and the Bergisel Ski Jump overlooking Innsbruck in Austria. Since then, in the 2003 she was getting closer to worldwide recognition.

The Expo 2010 in Shanghai China was a major World Expo in the convention of international fairs and expositions, the first since 1992.

The theme for the trade fair “Better City – Better Life” an indication to the world, the coming of “next great world city,” will eventually influence the 21st century. It had the largest number of countries participating and was the priciest in record for world’s Expo trade events. In the year 2002, China will host the World Expo events and their given assignment is to rearrange Shanghai city.

The Germany pavilion is one of the popular European pavilions in the expo. The theme, entitled “Balancity” contributes the devotion from the word, “balance”. The outlook of the structure is more of an asymmetrical balance, maintaining the heavy giant roof and the awkward arrangements that seem almost impossible to build.

The architect Lennart Wiechell from Schmidhuber +Kaindl Gmbh Germany was the designer for this project.

At first glance, every angle of the building is different, like shattered geometries stacked together in one structure. The building seems to have an awkward position of gravity; the top is heavier than the bottom, observing in different parts of the building, the whole structure given the impression of an unstable nature. As a cluster of geometries hold each other perfectly and expressing the name “balancity” through architecture.

The building had similar resemblance of Zaha Hadid’s work which refers to deconstructivist appeal and defying the rules of gravity with bizarre geometries. Architects from all around the world like Zaha Hadid had set foot in to China’s development projects and winning architectural success.

Case Study (1) (Public Critic)

One of her worst un-built projects that she had during the year1996 when she won the design for Cardiff Bay Opera House which was discard, it was assumed as a crucial component for the Cardiff Bay redevelopment projects in the1990’s. The development was thought to be a new opera house in Cardiff but in turn out The Wales Millennium Centre was built, replacing the original plan and in the year 2004, it was completed.

The Cardiff Bay Opera House Trust established an international design competition to decide on the architect project. The competition would be finalized in two rounds. In round one, the competition started with 268 international competitors and Zaha Hadid won the first round. Her avant-garde design for the main theatre was covered by a radical design glass structure. Nevertheless, her work and design was interesting enough and unique that the Cardiff Bay Opera House’s Trust, Lord Crickhowell as the chairman, requested Zaha Hadid to re-submit her work again, together with Norman Foster and Partners and Manfredi Nicoletti, who were asked to re-submit their work and revised for amendments, in round two, she won again in the second round competition.

The conclusion to refuse the bid was announced on 22nd of December 1995, the lottery money is to fund the project by the Millennium Commission. The Royal Opera House in London was backup by the Millennium Commission has affected the bid to turn sour, which was seen exclusively for that. The development did not gain sufficient supports from South Glamorgan County Council or possibly the media affected Cardiff City Council’s decision. The Millennium Commission and the UK National Lottery which supposedly to provide funds for the development, decline to support for the project as it measured to be a financially issue.

This was not relieved by the successful submission funding for the Millennium Stadium. In due course, the project collapsed and was rumored about the provincialism and the conservatism had damaged the outcome in associate to the modern architecture and partly because the Millennium Stadium was supported by the Cardiff Council. In the event of the news conference, Virginia Bottomley, Secretary of State for National Heritage announced that the project was imperfect by some questionable issues related to its financial and development troubles that would caused reservations for the project and the building. Lord Crickhowell interrupted the news conference to condemn the refusal. He said the result was “dreadful and making no sense at all, If this project was from London it would have gathered enough supports. The important projects from London will allow this to go on; however we can’t get hold of this sort of effectiveness”.

The developers of the competition made a standpoint towards to those who they consider unconventional has affected and scared Zaha Hadid’s career. After she won the 1994 competition entry for the Cardiff Bay Opera House was taken off and “re-evaluated”, resentment at the idea of building it. They sustain creativity output up to a certain limit of production and then the project will be eliminated because the development did not win enough supports financially from the Millennium Commission, the ‘UK National Lottery’, the organization which distributes funds to the project.

The Cardiff Bay Development Corporation presented the plan was to construct a long term residency for the Welsh National Opera on a location near the Inner Harbor at Cardiff Bay. The design was nicknamed the ‘Crystal Necklace’ by media, considering the estimation price of this building was far fetching from their expectation. The theater was valued at £86 million quoted by Zaha Hadid at the time and it was ‘a tragic moment for the people of Wales’ and ‘a victory for petty-mindedness’.

The Sun newspaper published a hate campaign and First Secretary of the Welsh Assembly Rhodri Morgan mocked the design project was disrespectful version to the Ka’bah in Mecca, believing that a punishment from god would fall upon Cardiff.

The Cardiff Bay Opera House was neglected from the project organizer; Millennium Commission after a heated argument opposed from the local campaigner, particularly Cardiff politicians worried of such radical architecture was being “forced” on to Welsh city by London’s decision. The authorities were knee in the conservative political traditions and the architectural culture had emerged since the 1970’s. The acceptance has come slowly for her. After the competition for the opera house for Cardiff Bay in Wales in the year 1994, her post modernism design was put down by the locals and those who criticized her work and in the end; her request to build the stadium was rejected.

As the replacement for this project, the Wales Millennium Centre was built, which included a wider range of artistic offerings, keeping with the Welsh heritage and the opera traditions. The Centre opened in November 2004, on location originally planned for the Opera House.

The popular design movement was slowly becoming more daring, but her ideas were far beyond their kind. It was an unexcited moment, for several years which set her back in her office, but one thing she learnt from the competition, the politics that involves her. Later, she became more philosophical, seeing it as a turning point in her career. She slowly learnt to have faith and walk again. After she won the Pritzker Prize that followed with her wild competitive attitude towards her avant-garde aesthetic nature has softened. She responded much of her current behaviors in to two undecided conclusions, living in anger over her failed Cardiff project or strained herself to insomnia.

‘Of course it was unpleasant,’ she said, she mentioned her lost was an important experience after Cardiff Bay. The year 1999 was like the dark ages for her. She did not stop working and continued producing some of my best work. She said defying the rules in that early period changed the way people identify architecture. She got upset that she wasn’t able to achieve her breakthrough success along with Cardiff Bay. She described her experience was “traumatic” and “It became a cause celebrity”. “Everyone was getting on to something, which was never allowed outsiders to win projects that were unknown and not part of their union. They did not accept the truth I was only a woman and to consider the winner was a foreigner as well.”

“I do not have a label or a typecast being stereotype, as a woman they would let you get off, but others will never escape that,” she said. She trusted her status being a foreigner, a non- British national and working as a female architect in London, has everything to do with good fortune. “In contrast, you are not their type, not a male, not a European origin, there are certain priorities that regardless for all the things you can do for them, you are still forbidden to enter. I’m not close to be a member of their brotherhood. I will never be golfing with men or riding on a boat trip with them, it will not occur in any time,” She complained. “In America, it’s different, the co-existence between men and women are professionally equal and justified…but not so much in Britain’s culture.”

“We were shamed by them who remembered the problem but they don’t seem to know what happened.”

She mentioned the aftermath of Cardiff would have finalized her decision to resign. “There isn’t any purpose for me to go on like this, but I had no choice,” she said. She made an awakening resolution in 1996, “I made a choice, I will not let them escape with this, and I will survive”. She and her 20 staff members in the office knew there was no work, distracted and yet they carried on.” After several years, she felt herself and her team mates were slightly more relaxed and now driven more by trouble-free wishes to create better things. She said that she could have done things better in general. “I have ideas and plenty of it and certainly, just like all things, you need to amend them first, but being an architect you only wish to accomplish better projects and spaces.”

Case Study (2) (Public Debate)

An exhibition held at the Galerie of Gmurzynska at Zurich, a debate entitled ‘Zaha Hadid and Suprematism’. The 1920s Soviet avant-garde, as her style and method, displayed works from Kasimir Malevich and others. Zaha Hadid’s partner and assistant, architect Patrik Schumacher, he is also a theorist, presented his talk, ‘A Glimpse Back into the Future’. Patrik Schumacher, Zaha Hadid’s architectural partner (ZHA) he is also an abstract speaker for 16 years and a content writer, producing theoretical texts to go alongside in every museum and opera house.

He disagreed by the next century of art and architecture will be so popular up to this frustrated decade that nothing has been done; it wasn’t planned by the Soviet avant-garde, ‘the time, the amount and value of that creative work of art, knowledge and creation was truly amazing. It was only one blink of an eye and it took 50 years spreading it to the world.’

He stressed the respect for this abstraction, referring to the extreme of non-referable concepts, Non-Objective World of Kasimir Malevich and Suprematist painters and architects that followed him, creating space where earthly rules were challenged.Malevich was a founder for abstraction and the first who found abstract art with architecture applying his shaping ‘tectonics’. It is exciting, however, to observe these tectonic sculptures, which were visualized as a form of a prototype architecture, where geometries being restricted like his composition paintings, too ‘cubic’ and almost mathematical, leaping into this independence of oblivion.

There is one person, who will never follow accordingly to the same direction. Since the early Russian avant-garde Zaha Hadid was inspired and took the first inspiration, absorbed with the works of Kasimir Malevich’, reflecting this insight in to her first major project. The Project Malevich’s Tektonik was a proposal for Suprematist style in replacement for London’s Hungerford Bridge

The Russian avant-garde could not be completely combined with architecture, not without people like Zaha Hadid building it, into a completely non-objective space, Even now Malevich persisted to free the last ruins from this spatial of reality. From a different point of view, ‘These projects’, Schumacher wrote, ‘in their entire radical experiments hidden a social message and a political agenda. But the social experiment from the Russian context has weakened in comparison with their artistic ingenuity and innovation’.

Since the early 20th century the Russian Futurist and Constructivist movements were inspirations for the deconstructivist architects using their creative architectures and graphics. Architects, deconstructivist, Zaha Hadid and many others were influenced by this idea of using graphics and geometrical forms from artist and creators like Kazimir Malevich, El Lissitzky, and those who were part of this movement.

Deconstructivism and Constructivism has been associated creating abstract art sculptures with tectonic structures.

As the fundamental artistic element, both were linked with this radical plainness of using geometrical objects, articulated in all related forms of graphics, architecture and sculptures. The concentration of Constructivist towards purism is because when the missing element of Deconstructivism, the situation of an object or figure is usually disfigured when construction buildings is deconstructed.

*The general graphic patterns of constructivism were usually drafted and share the similar nature with technical and engineering drawings.

Zaha Hadid is not theorist. In the early 1980’s, people like Bernard Tschumi, Peter Eisenman, Daniel Libeskind are passionate architects, graduated from architecture schools and they are the contemporaries of ‘deconstructivism’. She has no intention to justify her forms, although she always referred the similarities of Marxian Soviet avant-garde.

Daniel Libeskind gave a talk at the TED conference 2009 in America; his talk was entitled ’17 words of architecture inspirations’.”Buildings are an important form of expression in society, and we should attempt to make them as exceptional as we can, whenever we can.” Through his speech, he was stressing the words “optimism, political, expression, inexplicable, emotional, hand, real, raw, communicative and democratic” is about human beings. He believed architecture should be like people on an intense human level, rather than ideological or contextual level. Whether his architecture achieves that goal is another debate. Likewise, the use of words like “radical, risky, complex, unexpected and space”, explaining the possibilities to explore deep space rather than explaining what we have here on earth. This idea to assume architecture has similar forms like human beings or a living creature.

Daniel Libeskind works as an architect, architectural theorist, a professor and a deconstructivist for many years; when he was 52 year old, his very first building was completed; the Felix Nussbaum Haus opened in the year1998. As a result, critics had rejected his impractical creations as ” impossible to build or excessively bold.” His first design competition that he won was a typical housing project in West Berlin, the year1987, but the housing project was immediately canceled right after the fall of the Berlin Wall. In the early 1990’s, he entered several design competitions and winning projects of the first four.

The Jewish Museum Berlin, completed in 1999, was Daniel Libeskind’s first foreign achievement and it was the first designer’s building constructed since after the reunification. Most critics labeled his crafts are forms of deconstructivism. Like many great buildings in our time, his designs puzzle the expectations about the city and the characteristic of its furnishings. He is an abstract architect and from his talk as a supernatural-being trying to persuade the public about his ideas. Thus, the more tortured and alienating it is, the better the building. As city after city “bends over” for these actions, the architect takes on his ego.

Daniel Libeskind defying all logic, in one incident he persuaded museum of Palestine to waste hundreds of millions of American dollars on buildings that hardly function, that leaks continuously and hated by the public. It is sad that, he was using the philistine reaction of people who doesn’t know as much as he does. His undercut and belittle attitude comes across in every single part of his talk. This could be his confidence and his inner self believing that this rule of deconstructivism which is also the core concept, against every single rule of today’s architecture.

Since the late 1980s deconstructivism developments were part of this post-modern architecture. The concepts were referring to fragmentations, an interest of influence ideas using structure’s surface or skin, shapes which use the purpose to deform and disrupt various building blocks of architecture, for instance constructions and bends.

The complete visual of buildings that exhibit has that development “styles” of deconstructivist, depicting the inspiration of controlled disorder within its unpredictability nature. The history of the deconstructivist movement started in the year 1982, from the architectural design competition of ‘Parc de la Villette’, the winning entry goes to Peter Eisenman, Bernard Tschumi and Jacques Derrida at that time. In the year of 1988 Deconstructivist Architecture made its first appearance, held an exhibition in New York at the Museum of Modern Arts and the following year of 1989, the Wexner Center building for the Arts was opened in Columbus and the building was originally designed by architect Peter Eisenman.

The exhibition in New York displayed works from Frank Gehry, Daniel Libeskind, Rem Koolhaas, Zaha Hadid and others. Ever since the exhibition was held, some of the known architects who were involved with this Deconstructivism avoided themselves from this union. Some of the architects known as Deconstructivists were greatly influenced by Jacques Derrida’s ideas, the philosopher from Franc