A blood-red Thames flows through a long sheet of black paper against the wall, splicing through a fractured landscape of city blocks twisting and swaying as if sent by an irresistible force. The tangled artery networks extend from central London, cross the M25 and head east, gathering in a crescendo of colored fragments that seem ready to accelerate off the page.
The irresistible force that flexed the urban fabric of London was Zaha Hadid. The late Iraqi-born architect painted this distorted view of speed in 1991 at the request of Vogue magazine, projecting 75 years into the future to imagine what the capital might look like in 2066. Combining distorted planes, sections and aerial views , long before computers helped create such complex visions, was typical of his complex, multi-layered imaging style, using the painting process as a way to generate new ideas. “I think that through a set of drawings,” Hadid said, “one discovers certain things that would not otherwise have been possible.”
Having free rein on his 12,000-file archive was utterly overwhelming
Even once drawn, most of his futuristic dreams for London were impossible. But now, six years after his death, they have come together in an exhibition: the inaugural exhibition to be held at the Zaha Hadid Foundation, with some works seen for the first time. Curated by a group of master’s students at the Courtauld Institute of Art as part of the London Architecture Festival, Zaha Hadid: Reimagining London adequately occupies the ground floor of her former studio in a Victorian school building in Clerkenwell, which it now serves as a foundation. his. Where once there were rows of young architects hunched over their screens, now hang some of the radical designs that formed the origins of their practice.
Going up … the 14-storey hotel imagined by Hungerford Bridge. Photo: © Zaha Hadid Foundation
“It was like discovering a treasure,” says Rachel McHale, one of the students involved in curating the exhibit. “They gave us full access to their archive of 12,000 drawings, paintings, mock-ups and sketchbooks, with the freedom to decide what to do with them. It was exciting, but also totally overwhelming.”
Given the volume of material available, and the impenetrable nature of much of it, the students have done an admirable job of making a show that tells the story of Hadid’s relationship with his hometown of adoption with a impressive clarity. He began his student work, with two projects he produced for the Architectural Association in the 1970s that reimagined parts of the capital’s transportation infrastructure as hybrid and densely occupied nuclei of public activity.
His fourth-year project, inspired by Russian supremacist artist Kazimir Malevich, envisioned a 14-story hotel on top of the Hungerford Bridge, made up of pixelated cubic shapes. His fifth-year project conceived of a 19th-century museum, designed as a chain of buildings emerging from Charing Cross station, like the carriages of a derailing train as they loaded across the river to the south bank. . They contain the germs of ideas to which I would return 20 years later in a design for a livable bridge over the Thames, imagined as a horizontal skyscraper full of homes, offices, shops and artist studios, crossing the river and is shown. on display in a mock-up of crushed plexiglass fragments.
Crushed barter … Habitable bridge model, 1996. Photo: © Zaha Hadid Foundation
Another model case includes studies for an unfinished office building on Pancras Lane, showing how the skewed perspectives of Hadid’s paintings began to translate into twisted three-dimensional shapes that defy gravity. “People ask,‘ Why aren’t there straight lines, why aren’t there 90 degrees at your job? ’” He once said. “That’s because life isn’t made on a grid.” His strange schemes of waterfall-cooled underground skyscrapers might not have come to fruition, but his east-facing conception of London foreshadowed the city’s direction of growth. And a snippet of his simplified view of the East End was ultimately made in the form of the agile aquatic center for the 2012 Olympics.
The foundation, which Hadid founded in 2013, plans to keep his experimental thinking alive. Since last year it has been led by an impressive team of high caliber, led by Paul Greenhalgh, former director of the Sainsbury Center, with research. directed by Jane Pavitt, former dean of humanities at the Royal College of Art, and the collection managed by Leonora Baird-Smith, who directed the collection management at the British Museum.
“I love the idea of it being a think tank,” Greenhalgh says. “That can become dangerous and radical, and really compromise on the pressing issues facing our cities.” With a strong emphasis on education, the foundation has so far awarded three full scholarships to the London School of Architecture for low-income and refugee students, and plans to forge long-term research partnerships with other educational institutions. .
“Maybe this is London” … 1991 multilevel perspective. Photo: © Zaha Hadid Foundation
Greenhalgh expects the building to become something like the Rodin Museum or the Gustave Moreau Museum, both housed in places where artists lived and worked, with an auditorium, a gallery, and a space for events. Meanwhile, the former Shad Thames Design Museum building, which Hadid acquired before his death, will function more like an open warehouse: “It could be a city of models,” he says.
After a heated dispute over the fate of Hadid’s £ 100 million property was finally settled in 2020, the foundation can now focus on keeping its experimental spirit alive outside the courtroom. using its bases in the capital as a testing ground for more unrealized ideas. As Hadid put it: “Maybe that’s what London is all about: these potentials. Maybe their role is to be the final unrealized project.”