Zaha

Malevich’s Tektonik 1977

London, United Kingdom - Part I

If we examine the project Malevich’s Tektonik, considering the problematic of the first half of the 1970’s, which we recall as the years in which the historicist influence is strong (The Language of Post-Modernism by Charles Jencks comes out in 1977), we will see that the messages promoted by Hadid are at least four;

01. To rediscover, through Malevich, the abstract surge upon which the Bauhaus drew, Dutch Neo-plasticism, and finally, Mies. It is the refusal to deny the modern and decisive opposition towards the classical tradition, as had been reproposed in those years by Graves, Rossi, Krier, and Stirling.

02. To work with agile, intense and dynamic geometries. In short, a return to a fluid space marked by points, lines, and surfaces. It also recovers not only the neo-plastic of Mondrian and Van Doesburg but also the more fluid one of Kandinsky, with whom Malevich was frequently in touch. Also here a return to the sources, this time to the origins of the abstract when two lines, the rigidly geometric of neo-plasticism and the intensely emotional of the Russians, were no longer separate.

03. To declare a real disinterest in every dispute of a semantic nature. The 1970’s are anguished by the problem of language, by the attempt to recover meaning from architecture, often through iconic values or the reference to signs and symbols codified by tradition. Bringing up again the Suprematist aesthetic, Hadid affirms that the goal of architecture is not linguistic but expressive: it is the research of formal values, that is, of a new sculptural sensibility.