Zaha

Interview with Alvin Boyarsky - Part V

ZH: The ground could be anywhere, but once you establish a ground, you have to operate on it, especially in an urban situation. I think Brasília (for which Niemeyer was chief architect) operates on two levels. The wings of the plane suffer from the nonresolution on the ground. The reason that the central government buildings operate better than the residential housing on the wings is that they have a ground condition.

They have a lobby and two entrances, a grand entrance and a secondary entrance, which implies a datum that is private and operates in all the buildings on the first floor. There is a second datum on the ground and a third below ground. I’m not sure how intentional these things were; they were never declared, and on the wings - the housing -  there is this notion that the ground is free. The architecture leaves out the life of the ground.

AB: A small piece of one of the wings of Brasília was landscaped by Burle Marx. It doesn’t have the kind of life that you’re speaking about, but it does have a kind of articulation. It’s the only part of the housing in Brasília that I could feel was reasonable.

ZH: I don’t think the wings operate well, and that is the problem with Brasília. If they want to resolve the problem of Brasília, they should begin with this.

AB: But Brasília is interesting as a plan for something. One can see it growing as a sequence of analyses that develops into a thesis. You work in a similar way, with a parallel series of sketches and plans that grow increasingly more intense. But first you need to identify the problem you’re trying to resolve. Where do you start? You spoke of Mies. It starts with painting, doesn’t it?

ZH: Let me explain how I developed Malevich’s Tektonik (London, 1976–77). There were two layers. First was the program that I developed almost intuitively. A year later I did the plans, but I didn’t like them. That’s when I started the shipwreck. The shipwreck was very important, because it’s my connection to Rem Koolhaas. I did it totally intuitively because I had a nightclub in the Malevich, which was a shipwreck. Rem came to my jury - he wasn’t there the first time - and he said, “How odd, I’m also working on a shipwreck.” It wasn’t designed or published at the time; he was still working on it.