Aug 7th, 2007
In 1977 a starchitect was born. 30 years may have passed since Zaha Hadid graduated from The Architectural Association, yet her presence remains an integral part of AA culture. In 2006 the AA Gallery hosted an exhibition celebrating the technical achievements of Hadid’s newly opened Phaeno Science Center. The private view was witness to the architectural equivalent of Beatlemania, crowds filling every inch of 36 Bedford Square hoping to catch a glimpse of the lady herself, when she lectured the following week a student fainted. Zaha it would seem has become as iconic as her buildings.
Having worked on the AA exhibition, I was keen to see what The Design Museum had produced. Staging architectural shows is always challenging. The built environment, immobile by nature, leaves the curator the task of transporting the building or at least the experience of the building to the gallery and its audience in some other way. Zaha Hadid Architects has a prolific catalogue of built works and projects in the pipeline; this exhibition has clearly cast an unenviable curatorial gauntlet.
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Posted in Reviews by Simone Sagi | 1 Comment »
Jul 17th, 2007
Tom Dyckhoff, the architecture critic at The Times, has written an essay especially for this blog:
They didn’t have spellcheck back in 1982. Which is a shame because Zaha could have done with it. To a word-nerd like me, raised by lupine subeditors who think Lynne Truss is a wuss, and to whom every last apostrophe, every last correctly placed pronoun is a thing of exquisite beauty, close to divinity, the blurb in the exhibition accompanying her winning entry for the early-80s competition to build a luxury club, The Peak, in Hong Kong is enough to start palpitations. There are the inevitable mangled apostrophes (“it’s” instead of “its”), wayward or absent commas, the misspellings (“seperate”), the John Prescott sentences (“following the demolishment of the existing apartments”), the non-sequiturs that actually start out quite nicely (“the architecture appears like a knife cutting through butter devastating all the traditional principles”). Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Reviews by Tom Dyckhoff | 6 Comments »
Jul 2nd, 2007
The first press reviews of the Zaha Hadid - Architecture and Design exhibition have been published.
Edwin Heathcote, architecture critic at the Financial Times, has written a review/interview (above) in which he states: “Her time has come. The Design Museum show documents an architect at the peak of her career.” Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Reviews by Marcus Fairs | 2 Comments »
Jun 29th, 2007
Congratulations to Things To Look At blog for being, we believe, the first to post photos and a review of the exhibition (apart from us of course, but we have an unfair advantage).
Here are a couple of photos from Things To Look At; see more here.
Posted in Photos of the show, News, Reviews by Marcus Fairs | 7 Comments »
