The turn to abstract painting in order to loosen architectural representation from its restrictive conventions was a brilliant opening, but it produced a problem of its own, for rendering architecture so pictorial, even diagrammatic, also makes it weightless, almost immaterial. Hadid points to this tendency in her own descriptions of the early projects, where she writes, for example, of "floating pieces" of architecture "suspended like planets." (9) How, then, to reground structures that have become so unmoored? This is where her engagement with Constructivism comes into play; in effect Hadid deployed it as a materialist counterweight to the airborne idealism of Malevich and his followers. "The opposition between Malevich's Red Square and [Vladimir] Tatlin's Corner Relief" governed her work from her designs for Koolhaas and Zenghelis in the late '70s (in their fledgling Office for Metropolitan Architecture), designs that strive to hybridize the different languages of Suprematism and Constructivism. (10) Hadid pursued this synthesis in her own office after 1979, especially in The Peak of 1982–83, her winning entry in a Hong Kong competition that first brought her recognition in the architectural community. She describes this cliff-top resort (which was not built) as "a Suprematist geology," a paradoxical phrase that points to the tension between the principles represented by Malevich and Tatlin. (11) Yet it was her very ability to make this opposition generative in architectural terms that advanced Hadid—that positioned her, first, to be included in the landmark "Deconstructivist Architecture" show curated by Mark Wigley and Philip Johnson at the Museum of Modern Art in 1988 and, then, to be tapped as the designer of "The Great Utopia" exhibition at the Guggenheim in 1992–93 (which restaged the old rivalry between Malevich and Tatlin).

- bill 9-06-2006 4:57 pm




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