Zaha

Interview with Alvin Boyarsky

October 1987, Part I

The following is excerpted from a series of discussions on the occasion of Zaha Hadid’s 1987 exhibition of furniture at the Architectural Association (AA), England’s oldest school of architecture. Alvin Boyarsky, Chairman of the AA from 1971 to 1990, created a legacy of globalism at the school decades before such ideas as the Internet and multiculturalism were widely considered. Hadid studied at the AA from 1972 – 1977, when she was awarded the Diploma Prize. She returned to the AA to teach and ran her own studio at the school from 1980 until 1987.

AB: Tell me about the origins of your architectural style, in particular your unusual way of depicting architectural plans.

ZH: My work has developed out of certain early precedents in modern architecture. My original intention was to inject the ideas of Suprematism into architecture. I was curious about Rem Koolhaas’s bent plan for Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion (1928-29). Another influence is one of Mies’s patio houses, the Gericke House (Berlin, 1932) – it’s the only one where he bent his plan, and here the energy is not static. If you compare De Stijl to Suprematism, there is a kind of equilibrium in both cases, the former arrived at through total control and the later through total energy, not unlike a photographic free frame.

Mondrian would rework his composition until it was balanced and frozen. Malevich’s compositions were definitive, or finite, but they also functioned as a picture frame. If it could move, it would frame something else. In this way, his work suggests that the whole planet is connected. You might even say that its guiding force was not bound by earthly conditions. The implication is one of liberation. It’s from this notion that we arrive at the idea of the liberation of the plan.