Suddenly every museum in London is becoming an architecture museum. There’s Global Cities, the blockbuster show at Tate Modern; the Victoria and Albert has an architecture gallery; the Architecture Foundation is attempting to build itself a headquarters (designed by Zaha Hadid) right behind Tate Modern; and there’s Hadid’s first big British retrospective at the Design Museum.
Yet architecture has always been seen as something difficult to exhibit, a problematic translation of a genre that can only really be appreciated by being there. When I put this to Design Museum director Deyan Sudjic, he says: “I think we worry too much about it [though he looks like a man who doesn’t]. The Guggenheim’s biggest ever selling ticket show was on Frank Gehry. The V&A pulled half a million people in to see the Art Deco show.”
The Gehry show was the New York Guggenheim’s first foray into architecture, followed by last year’s big Hadid retrospective. It was a terrific spectacle, with theatrical models and drawings populating Frank Lloyd Wright’s dynamic spiral ramp at least as successfully as most of the art shows. A few days before the Design Museum opening, I ask Hadid what the difference will be between the shows. “This one will be smaller,” she replies.
This, I think, may be a hard interview.
In the event, a screaming baby a couple of tables away saves it. Hadid smiles and waves to the baby, by now taken outside. “I don’t blame him,” she pouts, “it’s so noisy in here.” The mood suddenly lifts and we find ourselves chatting about the massive changes in the London architecture scene, the destruction of so many decent modernist office buildings in the City and their replacement with bland commercial behemoths, and the contrast with the 1970s.
It is this last period I want to dwell on with Hadid. With the dozens of tower cranes currently tenderising London’s skyline for the arrival of a barrage of new skyscrapers, it is hard to remember the torpor of the 1970s. Nothing was happening. The last sheepish bits of the already failing utopian city were being put in place but seemed out of date already: modernism was beached.
But that inactivity proved the spur to an intellectual explosion, based largely around the Architectural Association. “It was an incredible period,” Hadid recalls. “There was the Arab oil money coming into London, there was punk beginning, it was very cosmopolitan, very alive and there was incredible activity at the AA with Rem [Koolhaas] and the others.” This was the era when Koolhaas, the great polemicist of contemporary design culture, began to cast his long, thin shadow across the city. Sudjic concurs. “That was an interesting moment. There was Koolhaas, Zaha, [the classicist] Léon Krier and [the deconstructivist] Bernard Tschumi all at the same time. It was a moment when people didn’t expect to build things and all that energy went into ideas, drawings and models.”
For two decades after this extraordinary time, Hadid was known as a paper architect, a visionary. Yet, in the past few years, her offices around the world have grown to accommodate 250 architects. Her recent buildings have proved a revelation, confounding her critics and cementing her reputation not only as the world’s foremost female architect but also as one of the very few who are genuinely attempting something new. Her buildings are fluid, theatrical and sculptural – structurally daring and spatially inventive, they sweep you up and astound you. The Phaeno Science Center in Wolfsburg is one of the most dramatic contemporary buildings I have seen; the factory for BMW in Leipzig is a brilliant piece of showmanship; the Maggie’s Centre in Kirkcaldy is a brooding black shell folded into the landscape that ultimately reveals a heart of light, an uplifting setting for cancer patients and a relief from the grim neighbouring hospital.
Hadid is also working on an ambitious transport museum in Glasgow and the undulating Aquatic Centre for the 2012 Olympics in London. Her time has come. The Design Museum show documents an architect at the peak of her career.
On entering, you are greeted by the black crystal constellation of Hadid’s “Swarm” chandelier flanked by the architect’s dynamic, constructivist-style early urban visions. These paintings, which established Hadid as a regular feature in the press, became familiar, part of the architectural subconscious but, in the wake of so much built work, have faded into the background. It is good to see them again, in all their frenetic complexity. The room continues with a stroll through portrayals of Hadid’s built work in every media, from reliefs to those characteristic drawings of hers, with slashes of brilliant colour on a deep black ground.
Upstairs (all bright and light as opposed to her black gloom below), models of buildings under construction beside Hadid’s sci-fi furniture comprise a panorama of fluid forms and piercing points, roofs morphing into walls and structure into surface. “In a sense,” Hadid says, “it is all about creating a landscape, of furniture, architecture, of the ground. Our buildings become part of the earth, they are folded and peeled away from it and build from the topography, becoming part of it. The problem in an exhibition is to present the architecture to the public. How do you stop it becoming monotonous? It needs to be varied, to be capable of being read in different ways.”
Some of the big paintings in the show, including extraordinary visions of Trafalgar and Leicester squares, attempt to anchor this cosmopolitan architect in a London context, to place her work in the cultural landscape in a way that was not done at the Guggenheim. Yet if there is any criticism, it is still this broader lack of context. Hadid is, despite her sculptural tendencies, skilled at knitting her structures into the urban context, in using space and landscape to reintegrate dysfunctional bits of city. That aspect of her work is absent here, as it is absent in her own presentation drawings, but then an exhibition can’t do everything: for that you really do have to see the buildings.
Hadid and I are just wrapping up when she gets a phone call. “It’s Julia [Peyton-Jones, director of the Serpentine Gallery],” she tells me, “she needs a new pavilion for the [summer fundraising] party, the other one won’t be ready in time [she rolls her eyes] so she’s asked me. Have you seen it? It’s like big mushrooms.” It is indeed – here is Hadid playing with the landscape again, this time making great billowing shoots sprout from London’s poshest park. Since those explosive days of the 1970s, Hadid has been envisaging a London of infinite complexity and jagged intricacy. Now she is getting a chance at last to realise that vision, and in this superb exhibition we can get a quick, cool shot of the future. And I’m looking forward to it.
‘Zaha Hadid – Architecture & Design’, Design Museum, until November 25
The writer is the FT’s architecture critic
