Zaha

Interview with Alvin Boyarsky - Part VI

ZH: A year later when I was assigned a nightclub as a project, I had a ship literally breaking through a glass wall. After this I returned to Malevich’s Tecktonik with the understanding that the shipwreck had to be done abstractly. I realized that the architecture occurs not only on the level of the tectonic, but also on the levels of the diagrams. So I began to fragment them. That’s how they go from a collision of the nightclub to the twisting of a Mies pavilion.

Then I went on to the Museum of the Nineteenth Century (London, 1977–78), which was also compressed. I realized the thing had to be freed and that it can’t be both linear and cellular. The Dutch Parliament Extension in (The Hague, 1978–79) was again a thin, compressed slab, but despite the linearity of the slab, certain public areas were much freer. In the Irish Prime Minister’s Residence, within the confined walls of the garden, certain things imploded and exploded - all this was indicated in a series of sketches. A pattern links Malevich and all the Russians, Mies, Niemeyer, and even Le Corbusier: through the liberation of the plan they all invent a new kind of space. This realization led me to all kinds of different studies.

AB: Your paintings are beautiful objects. They are beautifully illustrated and succinctly described, but to materialize buildings, you need a series of sketches and plans, which you can focus on one at a time, like a stack of notecards for a lecture. In a way there is very little discussion that goes beyond style in this world. And the motivation to do something is in the end very theoretical, highly speculative, and based on a great deal of observation and digestion.

ZH: Yes, you can experiment when you’re younger. But it’s difficult to predict what happens if your building is built and occupied by people. How does your idea translate into a urban space or a private house? How do people live in it? If it’s office space, how do they operate within it? These are questions that are interesting right now, because these days there is less and less inventiveness. There is no respect for anything visionary. Building is not architecture, and one feels that today there is no interest in architecture.