It wasn’t until I read Thomas De Monchaux’s April 4, 2016 article in the New Yorker that I appreciated the genius of Zaha Hadid’s painting. According to Monchaux, a 1988 MoMa exhibition of her paintings “may prove to have been the second most important American architectural exhibit of all time.” The first being that other exhibition at the MoMa that is always mentioned when recounting the history of modern architecture stateside — Phillip Johnson’s 1932 exhibit and pamphlet on The International Style. I would put her paintings here, but as an IP attorney, I know better, so instead I’ll link to the New Yorker article where you can see some of the best paintings and drawings:
http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/zaha-hadid-was-just-getting-started
The diminutive “queen of ____” was used to describe her architecture, and often herself, because gender is an inevitable focus when you’re the first woman to win a Pritzker Prize (and only woman, until it was jointly awarded to a woman and man in 2010). She was not a queen — a moniker implying a potential higher authority — she was simply the best at what she did. And what she did was to translate her famous deconstructivist and cubist paintings into jutting angles and lustrous curves, bringing paintings to life in a way no one had done before.
I was in Rome in April of 2016, and used the opportunity to visit one of her works, the Maxxi Museum, built in 2010.
The Maxxi is not an imposing building from the street, only two stories tall, matching the height and facades of the surrounding buildings. Only two large trapezoidal concrete forms poking out of the ends of the building on the second story hinted that this was not just another building on the block.
Walking into the courtyard off the street, the pretense of history is dropped: you see the windows of a room cantilevered out more than three stories up, and the swoop of walkway above you, supported by rows of steel tubes.
I knew from Google Maps that it wasn’t just a room, but the end of a long ramp of a curved rectangular solid that ran half the length of the building before jutting out above the courtyard:
The enclosed hallway/room above the entry that seemed to pull away from the building also stood out:
Hadid now had my attention, and when I walked into the lobby, she overwhelmed it.
I first saw the low trapezoidal white curve of the desk, before my eyes were led upward along the stark black railings of the stairs on the right. The stairs! Up up up they went, a sinuous ribbon of black on the light concrete walls that split and interlaced back on itself as it climbed. I was immediately drawn to the stairs, and started climbing them. I took picture after picture, only being able to advance a few steps before seeing something new. It was impossible to capture the experience of climbing them, as each curve revealed a new view, a new angle, yet hundreds of pictures, and even a movie would fail, because they wouldn’t allow you to turn your head at an impulse up, down, or back towards where you started. Even VR wouldn’t work, as it’s not enough to be able to freely turn your head — you must be able to walk to the edge of a railing and look down. VR would still force you to either stand still, or move with the 360 degree camera, and not move where you felt the design lead you.
From above, the angles of the desk were flattened, and the desk revealed nested oval forms. Probably unintentional, but anything that looks like an ear in an art museum makes me think of Van Gogh.
The stairs were both heavy and light, with solid (but hollow) black metal railings, and mesh steps that induced vertigo three stories up.
Large red tubes hung askew from the ceiling, boldly slashing into empty spaces. Walking around them revealed that they were carefully positioned to intersect the spaces between the stairs in just the right way, an effect that made them seem to be brush strokes from Hadid. The stark black lines of the railings on the background of the light concrete walls reminded me of her ink drawings. It felt as if you were walking into one of her paintings.
Cubist paintings appeared to my younger self as lacking dimensionality — flattened and seemingly randomly positioned planes and shapes. But when I walked into the Maxxi, those lines and planes assumed their proper form, and I suddenly understood what I was missing: not depth, but time. Time brings the third dimension to life, allows you to walk through the painting and untangle the many layers, or even better, to see the many paintings within the one. Gideon’s bedrock of modernism textbook was titled in the proper order: Time, Space, and Architecture, as if to suggest the way you view the subject (walk around it, from every angle, inside and out, for hours) is the defining aspect of the subject (architecture).
And the ceiling! Vertical concrete slats filtered light which flooded in through skylights, and the slats ran the full length of the ceiling before curving with the wall around a corner and out of view.
According to Ada Louise Huxtable, an architect’s primary challenge in designing a museum is to balance the tension between the curator’s desire to have the museum disappear in service to the displayed art and the architect’s urge to draw the viewer’s eye away from the displayed art and toward the built art: the experience of being within a novel form. I can’t say Hadid entirely succeeded, as the lobby and the room at the culmination of the stairs first overwhelmed me with form, and then led me to ignore the art and walk out on the cantilever to the window:
The rest of the galleries, however, were quite well designed, and the architecture faded into the background (concrete ceiling slats still curved in elegant proportion, but stayed out of view unless you looked up, instead focusing on their function: to bring enough natural light into galleries). There was a comprehensive exhibit on Turkey’s intersection of east and west, well-timed given the then-recent news of a flood of refugees from Syria reaching Turkey.
Hadid reasserts herself in the final galleries with bold angles and forms, and splashes of red, before bringing the viewer back to lobby:
The stairs reappear in the final galleries.
The only element I found lacking was Hadid’s occasionally overly sleek surfaces. The bottom of the catwalks between the black stairs were all covered with white plastic surfaces lit from beneath with fluorescent or cold LED lights, as if they were fashion catwalks in an MC Escher sketch. The gap between the railings and the wall was also lit with cold LED lights, as one commonly sees in restaurants and nightclubs. A hardwood floor overlooking the lobby seemed out of place.
A fitting farewell to an architect I wish I had gotten to know before her untimely passing.
All photography is taken by the author, except for Google Maps screen captures.