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Two
or three things
one
can say about her
(Zaha Hadid)
Pedro Levi Bismarck
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A lot has been written in the last few days
about Zaha Hadid, gone quite suddenly at 65, at the peak of a career that was
intense but certainly not short. Obituaries are difficult by nature: always too
close and, maybe for that reason, always tending towards generalization or
reduction. Every single text written in these circumstances is a risk, and this
one is no exception.
Amongst the diversity of manifested reactions,
one can find two kinds of arguments. On the one hand, there was praise to her
feminine condition—her being-woman in a men’s world. An argument that, in its
apparent feminism, maintains a certain tone of condescendence that ends up
fabricating a somewhat shallow generalization that tells nothing significant
about her, Zaha Hadid, and her work. (For instance, we do not admire Lina Bo
Bardi for simply being a woman, but rather for the role she played in and with
architecture; recognizing simultaneously that the condition of being-woman has surely
contributed to animate her project-of-architecture and to throw down certain
prejudices regarding the profession). On the other hand, against quick and
simplistic judgements of taste, some have defended the cultural relevance of
the Iraqi-British architect for architectural heritage. However, here too, one
cannot be too careful not to turn the history of the discipline — amidst the
cultural relativism that rules our time — simply into a cabinet of curiosities
of small relics deprived of their meaning.
What can then be said about Zaha Hadid? Or,
better—and perhaps more usefully—what can Zaha Hadid help us to say about our
time? First, it is crucial to recognize that she has, without a doubt, marked
the recent panorama of the discipline. She was a figure of reference, the
agitator and mobiliser of a whole mode of producing and understanding the
practice of architecture. But, exactly for that reason, she was the key
architect of a generation that, immersed in the cult of a certain “formal
experimentalism” ended up reducing architecture to an aestheticized regime of
production of isolated and self-referential objects. An architecture that,
without a doubt, has recuperated and animated the artistic experience of the
historical avant-gardes, but emptying it of its social and political condition.
An architecture without project—I would say—that turned the liberating promise
of the avant-gardes into a simple instrument of reproduction and accumulation
of capital, at the service of urban marketings
and globalized and dehumanized financial operations. All in the name of a
rhetoric of progress, of civilization and of liberal democracy that has, a long
time ago, stopped speaking in the name of populations and communities. An
endogenous architecture that, closed into the mechanics of its own creative
processes, into its own fabulations
and conceptualizations, has lost or abandoned the ability to problematize and
to critically dialogue with the world and with the reality it produces and in
which it inscribes itself. It made itself a personal and individual exercise,
sometimes euphoric, sometimes melancholic. Taking with it an army of
small-architects who, in the infinite division of labor, have become subjects
of an architecture without a collective project and without a commons.
Zaha Hadid is, in fact, a “woman of her time” as
someone said, and in her work we can read the signs and, above all, the illusions
that have animated a time that, today, weighs so much on us. For an entire
generation, the “formal experimentation” and the affirmation of the “autonomy”
of architecture have served to shake off the weight of an ideologically charged
past and to break free from that path that appeared to have as destination the
total blockade of architecture. For so many, the freedom and exuberance of her
formal gesture were, after all, signs of the freedom and superabundance made
possible by a capitalism at the end-of-history: all its enemies defeated, all
the walls fallen. (Zaha Hadid’s first work was built precisely in Berlin,
1986–1993, a stone’s throw away from the wall that used to divide the city and
the fall of which, in 1989, signaled the end of the Soviet Block.) However,
that freedom—we know today more than ever—was little more than an appearance.
Or, better, the “freedom of forms” was nothing more than a way to feed hope and
the promise of another freedom—this one ultimately impossible to achieve in the
absolute reign of economy. Still, we had long before exchanged freedom and
democracy for all those brief “promises of happiness” (to call in Stendhal’s
definition of the beautiful).
Perhaps that is the reason for Zaha Hadid’s
“objects” being simultaneously familiar and strange. Familiar because they
belong to our time. Strange because they always seem to be too close. That is
their virtue: they are the faithful image of that which we cannot see—our own
time. We face Zaha Hadid’s buildings like we face financial markets. Astonished
observers of their delirious movements, of their vertiginous and accelerated
lines, of their infinite planes ascending and descending, of the delirium of
stocks, of the constant flux of transactions, of imminent crashes, of their splendor
and their crisis, of crisis as absolute logic and calculated irrationality: the
ascension and the fall, “wise and magnificent of solids under light” (to
paraphrase Le Corbusier). They are the representation of our epoch or, better,
they condense or crystallize, in their internal formal logic, the logics of a
whole economic and political system.
An irony that isn’t deprived of cynicism. The
more exuberant and free is Zaha Hadid’s gesture and the more the markets affirm
“free initiative,” “free circulation” and their infinite possibilities, the
more stuck we are in their logic, the more enmeshed we are in their system,
unable to understand it, unable to react and to find ways of fighting and
resisting against our progressive transformation into subjects-commodities of a
financial game with no end in sight. Faced with Zaha Hadid’s “objects”, we are
always alone—we are never with them
but always before them. We are lonely
spectators living their own annihilation—or, perhaps the desire of it—as
absolute aesthetic pleasure. In them, there is neither critique nor hope, only
consummation and death.
Those that, today, still feed that dream haven’t
woken from the deep sleep of those “promises of happiness” yet to fulfil. They
cultivate the illusion that the salvation of the discipline is to be found in
an exercise of formal sublimation and in a false artistic autonomy, now emptied
of each and every project for a commons. And, in the end, in the affirmation of
that endogenous and self-enclosed discourse, they too are the makers of an
absolute illusion regarding the present condition of architecture that has
become unsustainable, the horizon of which being none other than the
irrelevance of the discipline itself.
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Pedro Levi
Bismarck
Punkto Magazine’s editor. Teaches at
Faculty of Architecture University of Porto (FAUP). Researcher in CEAU-FAUP and a FCT (Fundação para a Ciência e
Tecnologia)
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Images
1.
Zaha Hadid in her exhibition “City of towers”, Zaha Hadid Design Gallery. London
2013. (via: Zaha Hadid)
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Translation
Text originally written in Portuguese. Translated by João Florêncio and
Punkto. Many thanks to João for the excellent translation.
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Publishing date: 07.04.2016
Label: Architecture \
Spaces
