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Parking Garage: Gateway to the Future | |
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Changing Shapes of Space - Zaha Hadid | |
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Changing Shapes of Space - Zaha Hadid In Rome, these consist of existing historic buildings Hadid is renovating as part of the overall complex of what will be the largest modern art museum on continental Europe. The shape is most evident in the giant beams that zigzag from the opening projecting into an interior court, past the slightly overwhelmed historic structures, and out into the rear area where future expansions will take place. Underneath this strong form, galleries open up in cascades rising up towards light which Hadid admits between structural roof members. The expansion of space along terraced galleries and the movement of circulation around angled corners, up and down stairs and escalators, and through a complex arrangement of spaces that is the result of this simple gesture, all help to create the sense of endless development, of always more rooms waiting to unfold around the next bend. What ties all of this together is the roof, which is in actuality what makes possible and shelters the new space. A continuity of structure enables a continuity of space, but the two are not equivalent, and it is out of the contrast between these two that the character of the institution emerges. The zigzag shape is even clearer in Leipzig, where Hadid had to work around the giant production halls for the automobiles, which had already been designed by others. Her task was to create the communal as well as the office spaces, the public exposition of how the car was made and the provision of worker amenities, and she interpreted this as one job. The trajectory here also shelters and defines the entrances, and wends its way past the public reception area and rising terraces for workers' cubicles that shelter the cafeterias underneath, to the rear area where a gym and more prosaic facilities fill out the gesture's final nooks. The roof trusses here again create the continuity that ties all of these elements together. In this case, they are a bundle of super-high-strength concrete beams capable of spanning large distances, leaving the spaces beneath open to each other. Against this grand gesture, the conveyor belt along which the partially assembled and painted cars move from one production hall to the next seems almost trivial, though it does give both a programmatic and a propagandist meaning to what might otherwise remain just a gesture. These spaces are magnificent, but they also appear — along with their vertical and concrete embodiment, the Bergisel Ski Jump in Innsbruck (1999-2002) — to be among the last of the forms which unfold out of any kind of geometry that one might recognize from traditional building practices. But the diagonal motif does reappear in the Glasgow Museum of Transport Riverside Project (2004-2010). It also has become a facade element that slices open and brings down the scale of what would otherwise be rather massive and closed blocks, such as the Pierres Vives building in Montpellier (2002-2011) and the Eli & Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University (2007-). In some recent projects, the whole building becomes a mound of triangular forms that do not so much develop as snakes of spaces as pile up, as in the Guangzhou Opera House in China (2003-2009), into an artificial mountain sponsoring its own pebbles for entrance and service functions. The opera house and other related projects rely on space frames and cladding to contain a complexity of spaces that seem to be bursting at the buildings' confines. They also exhibit the firm's reliance on the computer to create integrated, large-scale buildings that finally accomplish the intertwining of structure and space of which Hadid has dreamt since her student years. Schumacher proclaims the primacy of the computer, arguing that it is the technologies that rely on its power that are allowing us to create what he considers to be truly modern structures. Hadid has come to rely more completely on the ability of the computer to unfold continuous spaces under and through an undulating fabric that at times rises up into bulbous masses or towers. In projects such as the E.ON Energy Research Department in Aachen (2006-2010) and, most notably, the Abu Dhabi Performing Arts Centre (2008-), the snaking forms reappear, coiling over and around each other. They then change, at their collective heads, into a mass of structure and circulation elements that surround a bulbous central space with a web of ramps, beams and rooms. This device both allows the building to exist as a physical entity and lets one explore the complexities of its interstices. These buildings appear almost impossible in their fluidity, but they let Hadid prove that her vision of unfolding and reweaving reality can in fact be accomplished with the help of the most advanced computer modeling equipment. One might add, however, that many of these projects also exist in what are tabula rasa landscapes, in which all they unfold is new construction and facilities, rather than existing as a revealing of a latent reality. Out of the snaking roofs and bending shapes, Hadid has recently also developed forms that billow out into what appear to be lighter-than-air structures barely tethered to the ground. The most poetic of these is the Nordpark Cable Railway in Innsbruck (2004-2007). It is no more than a canopy, and is made possible by an intricate web of steel, but all one sees is a gleaming white cloud of painted metal panels tied down along a few tips around the escalators and stairs. The architecture gestures and opens, defines and reveals the landscape without ever constraining either interpretation or space. In the designs for the Nuragic and Contemporary Art Museum in Cagliari, Italy (2006-) and the London Aquatics Centre (2003-2012), proposed for the 2012 Olympics but not to be built as designed, these clouds become containers of space that inflate to huge heights and give one the hope that someday soon Hadid's alternative to 1983's The World (89 Degrees) may not so much unfold out of her past work and our planet as float out into the sky as the promise of freer space. In the meantime, Hadid is keeping busy with the production of many and massive buildings, including several skyscrapers in sites as far afield as Dubai and Warsaw. There she is taking her twisting fluidity out into the sky, trying to open up the closed and too often phallic shaft into snakes that have been charmed up into the air, into shapes she likens to flowers unfolding, and into bulbous blocks cut open with atria and large openings that slash away at what are otherwise hermetic, air-conditioned and secured blocks divorced from their surroundings. Whether or not she can pull these behemoths apart sufficiently remains to be seen. Discuss this article in the Architecture Forum... Aaron Betsky is the director of the Cincinnati Art Museum in Cincinnati, Ohio, and was previously the director of the Netherlands Architecture Institute in Rotterdam. His books include Landscrapers: Building with the Land, False Flat: Why Dutch Design Is So Good, and The U.N. Building. Betsky has held the Eero Saarinen chair in architecture at the University of Michigan, and has been a visiting professor at Columbia University and elsewhere. He previously worked with Frank O. Gehry & Associates. This article is excerpted from Zaha Hadid: Complete Works by Zaha Hadid, copyright © 2009, with permission of the publisher, Rizzoli.
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