Tom Dyckhoff writes…
Jul 17th, 2007Tom 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”).
I like that knife/butter metaphor, even though it has nothing to do with anything really, let alone devastating all the traditional principles. And then there are those plain what-ARE-you-on-about, Zaha sentences: “the final criterion is a composite and total of all these programmatic…” — “beams” my notepad says, but what in lucifer’s name is a “programmatic beam”? — anyway, “… programmatic beams looking over the mountainside, and these suspended satalites [sic] constitute a Modern Geology.” I think the Times crossword would be easier than deconstructing that sentence.
But enough with the pedantry. Except to point out that Zaha, like many architects, doesn’t really do words. She’s never really used words as a primary method of presenting her buildings. Read interviews with her — DO an interview with her, if you dare — and she rarely talks about her actual architecture, preferring, instead, to talk about the time of day, what she’s just been shopping for, the latest tittle tattle, how (until she started designing the entire world and couldn’t really maintain the argument) nobody is brave enough to commission her, and, with some justification, the terrible plight of female architects. But very, very little about the actual architecture. Except when Patrick Schumacher is let loose, in which case (not, mercifully, in this exhibition) it’s all “polyvalent densit[ies]” and “inferred mass[es] subverted by the vectors of circulation”. You what?
It’s a peculiar trait when considered next to those other illustrious but loquacious travellers from the Architectural Association in the mid-70s, Daniel Libeskind and Rem Koolhaas. There’s nothing Libeskind likes more than a sentence that appears on first impression to be profound, and a seven-page press release explaining why this or that of his buildings is aligned with the motion of the spheres and refers to this or that paragraph in Wittgenstein. And Rem Koolhaas has always struck me as a writer first, an editor second, and an architect third. That’s almost how it happened in his career. You could even argue that Koolhaas creates architecture like an editor, buildings jump-cut to be “read”. Hadid, though, is a supreme designer first and a writer third. Which is all well and good with me. In an age of endless computer-generated “iconic” imagery, there are few today who can still create convincing, sensuous, visual fantasies which seem to mean nothing linguistic at all. They just are. What a relief. There’s no reason why an architect needs to explain anything at all, except that these days, with the media more feral yet more important to an architect’s career than ever before, an ability to construct an case for your design can be vital.
It’s just so odd that so vehement a person in person — one who never is backwards in coming forwards — is so reticent when talking about the one thing that drives her life. Is it a right brain/left brain thing? Is it that sometimes writing about architecture is like dancing about sculpture, sort of pointless? Maybe Hadid’s architecture isn’t “about” anything — just as Koolhaas’s defiantly is — or at least nothing on which she cares to elaborate. Or is it just magnificent marketing? The pictures do the talking, which, in an age in which the all-important feral media is more obsessed with the titillating image than ever before, is a masterful strategy. By saying nothing, her mute, enigmatic architecture can mean anything you want it to mean. Or nothing at all. And, most importantly, it can travel anywhere, anytime, the final triumph of the international style, and very good for the bank balance.
July 18th, 2007 at 7:54 pm
what a brave article. bravo Tom
July 23rd, 2007 at 11:59 pm
I don’t mean to be a pedant (well, maybe a little) but isn’t there something a little wrong, grammatically speaking, about this sentence: “an ability to construct an case for your design can be vital.” An case? Either someone’s gone and typed this up incorrectly, or Tom has been a little slack, or it’s a reflexive and ironic mistake put in there to echo back to the first paragraph in his article. Mmmmm.
July 26th, 2007 at 11:43 am
Er, of course, ahem, it’s intentional.
Postmodern writing, eh?
Top marks for sharp eyes.
August 12th, 2007 at 9:30 pm
Is there any non-white in this world, besides Hadid’s herself? Now a celebrated non-white person; figure head of a bunch of drooling, envious retinue; just like in “The devil wear Prada.”.
unnatural, cold, calculist, heartless design… dead man walking towards oblivion.
Hadid architecture is just a pile of concrete and cold materials shown through a photographers’ lens.
Any good photographer can make a pile of concrete looks beautiful.
Oh well money is at stake. Who cares about anything else. Cold, heartlessness is good enough for warmongers prowling for more blood, while SUVs ride through the night burning the oil of future generations.
How sad!
Lies of our times… the nile is a river in Egypt…
August 20th, 2007 at 12:16 pm
“Is there any non-white in this world, besides Hadid’s herself?!”
What difference does that make? Shes an architect and thats it.
September 15th, 2007 at 3:41 pm
I love all her work because I hate George Bush and so does she coz Im really deep,man.