Zaha

Interview with Alvin Boyarsky - Part IV

AB: It’s very interesting that you don’t use the word “space” at all.

ZH: I always think of a given space – I mean “space” in a broad sense, because you can never perceive small spaces. If you use the term “space,” as in public space, you mean a sort of overall concept, like air. You can never perceive the whole only if it’s an open space and not on the ground.

AB: But you do use the word “energy” quite a lot. It signals a kind of empathy, the narrow and wide and low. In the 1930’s a lot of people, particularly Italians, began to write about the space of architecture as being continuous. They would reverse the plan and make models of the space of a building.

ZH: That’s what’s interesting about Niemeyer’s work. He spoke to us about the lightness of the structure, how you do things to free certain zones. In the case of Mies’s New National Gallery (Berlin 1962-68) you have an empty space – a place you go to but shouldn’t occupy, like a public room. When I go to places like that, I find it staggering that the occupants don’t understand this viewing condition. Take the Mies show at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (Mies in Berlin, 1986). The exhibition organizers didn’t understand that if you have a Mies show, you have to express something of what he taught you. You can’t create a space as Mies would have done; that’s too difficult to do. But you have to try to give back something, and they couldn’t do it.

AB: Unfortunately, I missed that exhibition. What are you working on now, Zaha?

ZH: Right now, my interest is the given ground condition, which has been one of the weakest aspects of modern architecture. The ground condition was never properly resolved, except in New York, where you see lobbies and various ground-floor spaces that resolve the problem, not in a conservative but in a modern way. If you look at all the postwar housing, the CIAM (Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne) housing, Brasília – it all suffers from this problem of the ground.