:

DE sign:
(Deconstructing in-order to find new meanings)

A blogging space about my personal interests; was made during training in Stockholm #Young Leaders Visitors Program #Ylvp08 it developed into a social bookmarking blog.

I studied #Architecture; interested in #Design #Art #Education #Urban Design #Digital-media #social-media #Inhabited-Environments #Contemporary-Cultures #experimentation #networking #sustainability & more =)


Please Enjoy, feedback recommended.

p.s. sharing is usually out of interest not Blind praise.
This is neither sacred nor political.

Showing posts with label #architecture. Show all posts
Showing posts with label #architecture. Show all posts

Friday, November 17

1.61803398875 Design Hoax?

1.61803398875 Design Hoax?
Is the Golden Ratio Fact or Fiction? 

I've already posted a video lecture by Stanford Mathematics Professor, Keith Devlin titled Mathematical Thinking, it discussed where the Golden Ration has proved valid and where it was a complete fiction... 

There have been several articles also posted on the subject entailing that the famous Golden Ratio is a complete historical design hoax! that was passed on by many architects, builders and made an ideal of by many throughout history!? With no scientific background what so ever...
Following will embed article share by Co.Design & Arch Daily 
Enjoy...


The Golden Ratio: Design’s Biggest Myth

The golden ratio is total nonsense in design. Here’s why.

In the world of art, architecture, and design, the golden ratio has earned a tremendous reputation. Greats like Le Corbusier and Salvador Dalí have used the number in their work. The Parthenon, the Pyramids at Giza, the paintings of Michelangelo, the Mona Lisa, even the Apple logo are all said to incorporate it.







It’s bullshit. The golden ratio’s aesthetic bona fides are an urban legend, a myth, a design unicorn. Many designers don’t use it, and if they do, they vastly discount its importance. There’s also no science to really back it up. Those who believe the golden ratio is the hidden math behind beauty are falling for a 150-year-old scam.

WHAT IS THE GOLDEN RATIO?

First described in Euclid’s Elements 2,300 years ago, the established definition is this: two objects are in the golden ratio if their ratio is the same as the ratio of their sum to the larger of the two quantities. The value this works out to is usually written as 1.6180. The most famous application of the golden ratio is the so-called golden rectangle, which can be split into a perfect square, and a smaller rectangle that has the same aspect ratio as the rectangle it was cut away from. You can apply this theory to a larger number of objects by similarly splitting them down.
In plain English: if you have two objects (or a single object that can be split into two objects, like the golden rectangle), and if, after you do the math above, you get the number 1.6180, it’s usually accepted that those two objects fall within the golden ratio. Except there’s a problem. When you do the math, the golden ratio doesn’t come out to 1.6180. It comes out to 1.6180339887… And the decimal points go on forever.
“Strictly speaking, it’s impossible for anything in the real-world to fall into the golden ratio, because it’s an irrational number,” says Keith Devlin, a professor of mathematics at Stanford University. You can get close with more standard aspect ratios. The iPad’s 3:2 display, or the 16:9 display on your HDTV all “float around it,” Devlin says. But the golden ratio is like pi. Just as it’s impossible to find a perfect circle in the real world, the golden ratio cannot strictly be applied to any real world object. It’s always going to be a little off.

THE GOLDEN RATIO AS MOZART EFFECT

It’s pedantic, sure. Isn’t 1.6180 close enough? Yes, it probably would be, if there were anything to scientifically support the notion that the golden ratio had any bearing on why we find certain objects like the Parthenon or the Mona Lisa aesthetically pleasing.
But there isn’t. Devlin says the idea that the golden ratio has any relationship to aesthetics at all comes primarily from two people, one of whom was misquoted, and the other of whom was just making shit up.
The first guy was Luca Pacioli, a Franciscan friar who wrote a book called De Divina Proportione back in 1509, which was named after the golden ratio. Weirdly, in his book, Pacioli didn’t argue for a golden ratio-based theory of aesthetics as it should be applied to art, architecture, and design: he instead espoused the Vitruvian system of rational proportions, after the first-century Roman architect, Vitruvius. The golden ratio view was misattributed to Pacioli in 1799, according to Mario Livio, the guy who literally wrote the book on the golden ratio. But Pacioli was close friends with Leonardo da Vinci, whose works enjoyed a huge resurgence in popularity in the 19th century. Since Da Vinci illustrated De Divina Proportione, it was soon being said that Da Vinci himself used the golden ratio as the secret math behind his exquisitely beautiful paintings.
One guy who believed this was Adolf Zeising. “He’s the guy you really want to burn at the stake for the reputation of the golden ratio,” Devlin laughs. Zeising was a German psychologist who argued that the golden ratio was a universal law that described “beauty and completeness in the realms of both nature and art… which permeates, as a paramount spiritual ideal, all structures, forms and proportions, whether cosmic or individual, organic or inorganic, acoustic or optical.”
He was a long-winded guy. The only problem with Zeising was he saw patterns where none exist. For example, Zeising argued that the golden ratio could be applied to the human body by taking the height from a person’s navel to his toes, then dividing it by the person’s total height. These are just arbitrary body parts, crammed into a formula, Devlin says: “When measuring anything as complex as the human body, it’s easy to come up with examples of ratios that are very near to 1.6.”
But it didn’t matter if it was made up or not. Zeising’s theories became extremely popular, “the 19th-century equivalent of the Mozart Effect,” according to Devlin, referring to the belief that listening to classical music improves your intelligence. And it never really went away. In the 20th century, the famous Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier based his Modulor system of anthropometric proportions on the golden ratio. Dalí painted his masterpiece The Sacrament of the Last Supper on a canvas shaped like a golden rectangle. Meanwhile, art historians started combing back through the great designs of history, trying to retroactively apply the golden ratio to Stonehenge, Rembrandt, the Chatres Cathedral, and Seurat. The link between the golden ratio and beauty has been a canard of the world of art, architecture, and design ever since.

YOU DON’T REALLY PREFER THE GOLDEN RATIO

In the real world, people don’t necessarily prefer the golden ratio.
Devlin tells me that, as part of an ongoing, unpublished exercise at Stanford, he has worked with the university’s psychology department to ask hundreds of students over the years what their favorite rectangle is. He shows the students collections of rectangles, then asks them pick out their favorite one. If there were any truth behind the idea that the golden ratio is key to beautiful aesthetics, the students would pick out the rectangle closest to a golden rectangle. But they don’t. They pick seemingly at random. And if you ask them to repeat the exercise, they pick different rectangles. “It’s a very useful way to show new psychology students the complexity of human perception,” Devlin says. And it doesn’t show that the golden ratio is more aesthetically pleasing to people at all.
Devlin’s experiments aren’t the only ones to show people don’t prefer the golden ratio. A study from the Haas School of Business at Berkeley found that, on average, consumers prefer rectangles that are in the range of 1.414 and 1.732. The range contains the golden rectangle, but its exact dimensions are not the clear favorite.

MANY OF TODAY’S DESIGNERS DON’T THINK IT’S USEFUL

The designers we spoke to about the golden ratio don’t actually find it to be very useful, anyway.
Richard Meier, the legendary architect behind the Getty Center and the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art, admits that when he first started his career, he had an architect’s triangle made that matched the golden ratio, but he had never once designed his buildings keeping the golden ratio in mind. “There are so many other numbers and formulas that are more important when designing a building,” he tells me by phone, referring to formulas that can calculate the maximum size certain spaces can be, or ones that can determine structural load.
Alisa Andrasek, the designer behind Biothing, an online repository of computational designs, agrees. “In my own work, I can’t ever recall using the golden ratio,” Andrasek writes in an email. “I can imagine embedding the golden ratio into different systems as additional ‘spice,’ but I can hardly imagine it driving the whole design as it did historically… it is way too simplistic.”
Giorgia Lupi of Accurat, the Italian design and innovation firm, says that, at best, the golden ratio is as important to designers as any other compositional rule, such as the rule of thirds: maybe a fine rule-of-thumb, but one that good designers will feel free to reject. “I don’t really know, in practice, how many designers deliberately employ the golden ratio,” she writes. “I personally have never worked with it our used it in my projects.”
Of the designers we spoke to, industrial designer Yves Béhar of Fuseproject is perhaps kindest to the golden ratio. “I sometimes look at the golden ratio as I observe proportions of the products and graphics we create, but it’s more informational than dogmatic,” he tells me. Even then, he never sets out to design something with the golden ratio in mind. “It’s important as a tool, but not a rule.”
Even designers who are also mathematicians are skeptical of the golden ratio’s use in design. Edmund Harriss is a clinical assistant professor in the University of Arkansas’ mathematics department who uses many formulas to help generate new works of art. But Harriss says that the golden ratio is, at best, just one of many tools at a mathematically inclined designer’s fingertips. “It is a simple number in many ways, and as a result it does turn up in a wide variety of places…” Harriss tells me by email. “[But] it is certainly not the universal formula behind aesthetic beauty.”

WHY DOES THE MYTH PERSIST?

If the golden ratio’s aesthetic merit is so flimsy, then why does the myth persist?
Devlin says it’s simple. “We’re creatures who are genetically programmed to see patterns and to seek meaning,” he says. It’s not in our DNA to be comfortable with arbitrary things like aesthetics, so we try to back them up with our often limited grasp of math. But most people don’t really understand math, or how even a simple formula like the golden ratio applies to complex system, so we can’t error-check ourselves. “People think they see the golden ratio around them, in the natural world and the objects they love, but they can’t actually substantiate it,” Devlin tells me. “They are victims to their natural desire to find meaning in the pattern of the universe, without the math skills to tell them that the patterns they think they see are illusory.” If you see the golden ratio in your favorite designs, you’re probably seeing things.

Is the Golden Ratio Design's Greatest Hoax?


For more than 150 years, the Golden Ratio has been one of the main tenets of design, informing generations of architects, designers, and artists. From Le Corbusier to AppleVitruvius to Da Vinci, the ratio purportedly dictates which forms will be found aesthetically pleasing.  Yet mathematicians and designers have grown skeptical of the practical applications of the Golden Ratio, with Edmund Harriss of the University of Arkansas' mathematics department putting it at its most simple: "It is certainly not the universal formula behind aesthetic beauty." Writing for Fast Co. Design, John Brownlee collates sources as diverse as the mathematics department at Stanford University to Richard Meier, laying out the case against what may just be design's greatest hoax. Read the full article here.


embracing it...












BBC Universe Documentary The Great Math Mystery BBC Documentary






Fibonacci Melody: Greg Sheehan at TEDxSydney

Greg Sheehan is one of Australia's premier and most innovative percussionists widely regarded internationally as a leader in his field. As a performer, he is significantly represented in the last three decades of Australian contemporary music as both a live band member and studio musician on hundreds of recordings. Greg has created a melody from the first 8 numbers in the Fibonacci sequence and performs it in the Concert Hall of the Sydney Opera House for TEDxSydney 2013. In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. At a TEDx event, TEDTalks video and live speakers combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. These local, self-organized events are branded TEDx, where x = independently organized TED event. The TED Conference provides general guidance for the TEDx program, but individual TEDx events are self-organized.* (*Subject to certain rules and regulations)



The Secret Mathematicians - Professor Marcus du Sautoy


Professor du Sautoy examines the way that Mathematics has overtly and covertly inspired some of the greatest artists. He examines how they might be considered as secret mathematicians: http://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and... From composers to painters, writers to choreographers, the mathematician's palette of shapes, patterns and numbers has proved a powerful inspiration. Artists can be subconsciously drawn to the same structures that fascinate mathematicians as they hunt for interesting new structures to frame their creative process.

Professor du Sautoy will explore the hidden mathematical ideas that underpin the creative output of well-known artists and reveal that the work of the mathematician is also driven by strong aesthetic values. The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College Website: http://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and... Gresham College has been giving free public lectures since 1597. This tradition continues today with all of our five or so public lectures a week being made available for free download from our website. There are currently over 1,500 lectures free to access or download from the website. Website: http://www.gresham.ac.uk Twitter: http://twitter.com/GreshamCollege Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/greshamcollege

Saturday, September 9

The City might Win!

The City might win after all, if it doesn't follow after Damascus Urban Organisational Planning Model! If one can make such a description 
(Praying, that God might help Middle-Eastern cities) 
I'm sharing a session on Rethinking the City of Aleppo post-war future, and hopeful civic thinking, enjoy... 


Rethink Aleppo: The City Always Wins (EN) from Pakhuis de Zwijger on Vimeo.
Imagining and designing a city of the future. With talks, a variety of workshops and an Eat to Meet 'vrijheidsmaaltijd'.

Aleppo is one of the oldest cities in the world and has been rebuilt many times before. We will dive into history and the elements that make Aleppo, a distinct city with AlHakam Shaar from The Aleppo Project and Dutch Historian Geert Mak. Then we look into historical examples of rebuilding cities from Afghanistan to Macedonia. After that, young Syrian designers will share their sense of design of Syrian homes. We are then ready to imagine future scenarios for Aleppo. You can choose one of three workshops on future city making. Join us and contribute to cutting edge ideas, disruptive innovations, out of the box efforts, hardcore research and diverse networks about place making and building future cities. Naturally, exercises in hopeful futures include music, films, beauty and dinner!


https://dezwijger.nl/programma/the-city-always-wins

Saturday, July 8

Architecture of Refugees II W.A.Ve 2017

W.A.Ve 2017 Syria





on Ethics of Intervention and Insta follow-up




VENICE CHARTER ON RECONSTRUCTION 
The VENICE CHARTER ON RECONSTRUCTION aims at the establishment of clear guidelines for post-war development. Though generated in response to the Syrian conflict, the charter aims to be useful in any other similar possible scenarios. The nature of modern conflicts challenges our understanding of conventional war: they manifest as permanent, asymmetric local and mobile wars between numerous transnational actors, and they extend beyond geographical boundaries. The Syrian case presents an example of how local conflicts involve the whole international community: epochal migrations, global terrorism and widespread violence affect globally every person regardless of any economic, social and religious boundaries.

Tuesday, May 16

The Architecture of Refugees I

The Architecture of Refugees: The Question of Ethics


Uploaded on May 12, 2017
Hosted by the MIT Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture

Significant transformations in the world's political landscape are signaling the emergence of a new world order that undermines the
certitudes established at the end of World War II. At the core of such discussions, the concept of human rights is significantly challenged, calling for a discussion at the core of ethics for the revisions of the principles and mechanisms of intervention. In reaction to these new transformations some have called for a World Parliament representing the people and not governments to replace the UN General Assembly.

The workshop addresses the agency of architecture and design in a context where the disrespect of human rights is aggravated by
the incapacity of global institutions to react efficiently. What are the ethical questions regarding the architecture of refugees? What timescales, short or long terms, represent a priority for architecture and through which agenda – refugee relief, historical preservation, camp upgrades and daily life, or rebuilding and resettlement? What is the role of design in front of the degradation and destruction of cultural artifacts? How can design be channeled towards peace building objectives and possible resettlement projects? What are the material, technological, systemic responses to address emergency needs in the context of refugee camps?

Speakers:

Ethics of International Law as a Framework for Displacees and Refugees
Balakrishnan Rajagopal

Ethics and Politics of Post-Conflict Repair
Delia Wendel

Material Culture and Historical Conservation
Admir Masic

After Belonging
Carlos Minguez Carrasco

Architecture of Exile: The Permanent Temporariness of Refugee Camps
Alessandro Petti

Panel Discussion moderated by El Hadi Jazairy

Friday, March 24

City Debates (at) AUB 2017

"City Debates 2017 explores the emergence of urban-based political movements in various national contexts where “the city” and/or some of its ingredients (e.g. housing, public space, services, livelihoods) have been serving as the basis for new forms of claims. By documenting comparatively these movements through profiling the actors, strategies, tools, networks of solidarity, forms of lesson sharing, and the frames through which claims have been formulated, the Debates seek to investigate critically and comparatively these new forms of collective action. We ask: Are we indeed witnessing emancipatory political claims or, to the contrary, a reduction of the horizons of the political to the minimal necessities of everyday life? Furthermore, as professionals of the built environment, how do such movements affect our practice? How do they change the premises and assumptions of our profession? On what grounds should we engage such social movements and the spaces they create? What can we learn from their tactics and strategies? ..."


2017 Sous les Pavés, la Plage…
Itineraries of Urban Social Movements

excerpt of http://www.aub.edu.lb/fea/citydebates/Pages/2017/index.html#


Abstracts > http://www.aub.edu.lb/fea/citydebates/Pages/2017/abstracts.html



City Debates 2017 Opening

City Debates 2017 Panel 1: The 'Urban' in Social Movements


City Debates 2017 Panel 2: Alternative Urban Ideals


City Debates 2017 Panel 3 Discontent and Mobilization in the Face of Neoliberal Policies


City Debates 2017 Panel 4 Urban Social Movements and Local Governance

City Debates 2017 Panel 5 Urban Struggles at the Margins


City Debates 2017 Ananya Roy - The Politics of Space & Scale in the Age of Trumpism


City Debates 2017 Roundtable 1: Mobilization Experiences: Emerging Strategies and Frames


City Debates 2017 Roundtable 2: Towards an Urbanisme Engagé


City Debates 2017 Closing Panel Wrapping Up the Debates

Friday, November 11

In Honor of Zaha

In Honor of Zaha Hadid: A Conversation with Frank Gehry, Peter Eisenman and Deborah Berke


Published on Apr 11, 2016
In Honor of Zaha Hadid: A Conversation with Frank Gehry, Peter Eisenman and Deborah Berke, moderated by Mark Foster Gage.
Three senior, distinguished members of the Yale School of Architecture faculty, each of whom who had enjoyed strong, personal and long-lived histories with Norman R. Foster Visiting Professor Zaha Hadid, engage in a conversation about architecture and Professor Hadid, who died unexpectedly on 31 March 2016.

Sunday, May 1

Dame Z

Tribute to Zaha




Dame Zaha Mohammad HadidDBE (Arabicزها حديد‎ Zahā Ḥadīd; 31 October 1950 – 31 March 2016) was an Iraqi architect. She was the first woman and the first Muslim to receive the Pritzker Architecture Prize, winning it in 2004. She received the Stirling Prizein 2010 and 2011. In 2012, she was created a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire and in 2015 she became the first woman to be awarded the RIBA Gold Medal in her own right.[1]
Hadid liberated architectural geometry[2] with the creation of highly expressive, sweeping fluid forms of multiple perspective points and fragmented geometry that evoke the chaos and flux of modern life.[3] A pioneer of parametricism, and an icon ofneo-futurism, with a formidable personality, her acclaimed work and ground-breaking forms include the aquatic center for the London 2012 Olympics, the Broad Art Museumin the U.S., and the Guangzhou, China opera house.[4]
On 31 March 2016, Hadid died of a heart attack in a Miami hospital, where she was being treated for bronchitis.[5][6]

http://www.zaha-hadid.com/






BMW Central Building © CNN from Zaha Hadid Architects on Vimeo.



Venice Biennale Theme ‘Common Ground’ Zaha Hadid Architects from Zaha Hadid Architects on Vimeo.

Born in Baghdad Iraq in 1950, Zaha Hadid commenced her college studies at the American University in Beirut, in the field of mathematics. She moved to London in 1972 to study architecture at the Architectural Association and upon graduation in 1977, she joined the Office of Metropolitan Architecture (OMA). She also taught at the Architectural Association (AA) with OMA collaborators Rem Koolhaas and Elia Zenghelis.
She began her own practice in London in 1980 and won the prestigious competition for the Hong Kong Peak Club, a leisure and recreational center in 1983. Painting and drawing, especially in her early period, are important techniques of investigation for her design work. Ever since her 1983 retrospective exhibition at the AA in London, her architecture has been shown in exhibitions worldwide and many of her works are held in important museum collections.
Known as an architect who consistently pushes the boundaries of architecture and urban design, her work experiments with new spatial concepts intensifying existing urban landscapes and encompassing all fields of design, from the urban scale to interiors and furniture.
She is well-known for some of her seminal built works, such at the Vitra Fire Station (1993), Weil am Rhein, Germany, the Mind Zone at the Millennium Dome (1999) Greenwich, UK, a ski jump (2002) in Innsbruck, Austria and the Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art (2003) in Cincinnati, Ohio. Parallel with her private practice, Hadid has continued to be involved in academics, holding chairs and guest professorships at Harvard University, Yale University, the University of Illinois at Chicago, Columbia University, the University of Visual Arts in Hamburg and the University of Applied Arts in Vienna.



Sleuk Rith  Institute Cambodia from Zaha Hadid Architects on Vimeo.




Parametric Space - teaser from Kollision on Vimeo.
Zaha Hadid Architects [http://www.zaha-hadid.com] are working with design office Kollision [http://kollision.dk], CAVI [http://cavi.au.dk] and Wahlberg [http://www.wahlberg.dk] to create the interactive installation 'Parametric Space' for the exhibition 'Zaha Hadid - World Architecture' at the Danish Architecture Centre [http://www.dac.dk] 29 June - 29 September 2013. The installation is a fully parametric space that will react on visitors movements - in shape and expression.

The exhibition has been developed by Zaha Hadid Architects in collaboration with the Danish Architecture Centre, supported by Realdania and Kvadrat.


See the final installation here: https://vimeo.com/69356542

For more information see kollision.dk/en/parametric

Furthermore see the following link for more media architecture projects from Kollision: vimeo.com/album/1809263


Cincinnati Arts Centre © Zaha Hadid Architects from Zaha Hadid Architects on Vimeo.



Mathematics Gallery at the Science Museum, London from Zaha Hadid Architects on Vimeo.




New National Stadium Video Presentation from Zaha Hadid Architects on Vimeo.
Zaha Hadid Architects welcomes a new bidding process for the New National Stadium in order to reduce costs and ensure value for money in terms of quality, durability and long-term sustainability. This video presentation and report outlines in detail the unique design for the New National Stadium which has been thoughtfully developed over two years to be the most compact and efficient stadium for this very special location in Tokyo.


Designed by Zaha Hadid Architects and our Japanese partners, the New National Stadium contains all the knowledge and expertise gained from the team’s direct experience of other Olympic, World Cup and World Championship stadia. The substantial investment in time, effort and resources already made by the Government and people of Japan into the existing team over the past two years ensures the New National Stadium can be completed in time to welcome the world to Japan in 2019 ahead of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic and Paralympic Games, and become a new home for sport for many future generations of Japan’s athletes, sportsmen and women.


Global Cities at the Tate Modern © Zaha Hadid Architects from Zaha Hadid Architects on Vimeo.




Inside the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University from Zaha Hadid Architects on Vimeo.

Michigan State University's Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum opened at MSU on November 10, 2012. Here's MSU University Advancement's sneak peak look inside at the November 9 media preview.


JS Bach / Zaha Hadid Architects Music Hall © Zaha Hadid Architects from Zaha Hadid Architects on Vimeo.




Edifici Torre Espiral © Zaha Hadid Architects from Zaha Hadid Architects on Vimeo.




Spittelau Viaducts Housing Project © Zaha Hadid Architects from Zaha Hadid Architects on Vimeo.





Salerno Maritime Terminal © Zaha Hadid Architects from Zaha Hadid Architects on Vimeo.


Habitable Bridge over the River Thames © Zaha Hadid Architects from Zaha Hadid Architects on Vimeo.




Z-Car © Zaha Hadid Architects from Zaha Hadid Architects on Vimeo.

Essay


The Architecture of Zaha Hadid 
By Joseph Giovannini
Architect and Critic
"Very few buildings can stand up to the Alps without retreating into modesty, but Zaha Hadid’s dynamic and lyrical Bergisel Ski Jump in Innsbruck, Austria, completed in 2002, confronts the surrounding mountains with an equivalent architectural majesty. At the top of a hill, the structure occupies the sky, a free-standing silhouette. Within the bowl of a valley ringed by hills and vertiginous mountains, the turning form of the clubhouse seems to gather and funnel the aerial energy of the mountainscape to the long, bowed ramp that lofts jumpers toward the city below. Hadid designed the sweeping structure from top to bottom as one fluid gesture that both summarizes the surrounding landscape in a sweep of movement, and sends skiers down a jump conceived in an act of fluid geometric empathy akin to flight.As in Michelangelo’s Sistine Ceiling, where God nearly touches Adam’s hand to spark life, Hadid has provided the index finger that makes a visual connection between the sky and the ground. Here the spark of life is completed in the jump. The sensuous forms visualize and poeticize the leap, spiraling the mountainscape, sky and ground into a fluid continuum.
Air is Hadid’s element: she floats buildings that reside aloft. At a time, in the early 1980s, when architects were concerned about manifesting the path of gravity through buildings, Hadid invented a new anti-gravitational visual physics. She suspended weight in the same way dramatists suspend disbelief. In 1983, she won a much-published international competition for a sports club on the Peak above Hong Kong with a crystalline structure that seemed to explode from the mountainside, creating in the fragmentary fall-out a structure that evaded any sense of a unitary whole. Eruption rather than gravity was the defining force directing the path of a building that thrived in the air. Floor planes were no longer extruded up from a single foundation, stacked atop one another, but beamed out in different directions, shifting as they rose in a complex section. A highway curved through the building in the space between the splayed, airborne volumes.
Historically, the proposal broke new ground in the field, and did so radically. As original to architecture as the twelve-tone scale once was to music, the design represented architecture of a wholly different and very unexpected order. Whatever the metaphor—explosion, implosion, fragmentation—the design favored open forms rather than closed, hermetic volumes; it offered breathing porosity rather than sealed fortification. The design quickly proved a foundational thesis for architecture, an unexpected precedent for shifting Modernism’s paradigm from simplicity to complexity. The theory behind the building moved away from modernism’s ideas of mass production, received typologies and the normative, to a more complex order of a kind that privileged the unique and the fragmentary. The scheme signaled a shift in sensibilities not only from truisms of the past but also from set tenets of industrial modernism, toward an indeterminate complexity sited on shifting ground somewhere between order and chaos.
In the 1980s, many people mistakenly believed that the Peak was influenced by the use of the computer. But the influence was historical, and in the context of the Pritzker Prize, awarded this year in St. Petersburg, coincidental. The imperial Russian capital was the seat of the Russian Avant-Garde artists who inspired Hadid very early in her career.
Vladimir Malevich, who pursued a mystic fourth dimension in his paintings and architectural schemes, had studied here, and he and his pupil El Lissitzky embarked on a remarkable journey into spatial mystery in the 1910s and ’20s. Their promising experiments were aborted by a Soviet state that adopted Soviet Realism in art as official policy, and a bombastic version of classicism in architecture.The flame of discovery went out for decades.
In the 1970s, however, Hadid, a student at the Architectural Association in London, took Malevich’s abstract compositions and, giving them scale and function, turned them into architectural projects that gave life again to the vision. Courageously she set off on a course to realize ideas, such as fragmentation and layering, never built by the Suprematists themselves. Inspired by Malevich’s ethereal paintings, she took up the brush as a design tool, and for her, painted tableaux became a locus of spatial invention. With this methodology, applied in the elusive pursuit of almost intangible form, she escaped the prejudice latent in such design tools as the T-square and parallel rule, traditionally used by architects. Hadid came off the drawing boards, much as Frank Gehry did when, influenced by artists, he left behind the usual drawings to conceive his buildings sculpturally, often with his hands. Hadid abandoned the regularity of the T-square and parallel rule in buildings emancipated from the right angle..."
http://www.pritzkerprize.com/sites/default/files/file_fields/field_files_inline/2004_essay_0.pdf


About Us - Zaha Hadid Architects from Zaha Hadid Architects on Vimeo.





Madrid Civil Courts of Justice © Zaha Hadid Architects from Zaha Hadid Architects on Vimeo.


(CNN) Frank Gehry: "She was a great architect and a great friend. I will miss her."
Richard Rogers: "Zaha Hadid was a radical genius -- an architect far ahead of her time. I loved Zaha and will miss her"
Norman Foster: "I think it was Zaha's triumph to go beyond the beautiful graphic visions of her sculptural approach to architecture into reality that so upset some of her critics. She was an individual of great courage, conviction and tenacity. It is rare to find these qualities tied to a free creative spirit. That is why her loss is so profound and her example so inspirational. And, besides, she was my dear friend."

A tribute to Zaha Hadid RA: 1950–2016


Published 31 March 2016

One of the world’s greatest architects, Zaha Hadid inspired a generation. Following the sad news of her death, the RA’s Head of Architecture and two fellow architects reflect on a visionary career.




  • Zaha Hadid RA sadly died in Miami following a heart attack on Thursday 31 March, aged 65. Announcing the news, the President of the Royal Academy, Christopher Le Brun, said: “We are shocked and saddened by the news of the passing of Dame Zaha Hadid RA. She was a visionary architect who has inspired a generation and this is a great loss for the world of architecture.” Here, Kate Goodwin, Alan Stanton RA and Peter Cook RA pay tribute.
  • Kate Goodwin, RA Head of Architecture





    The news of Zaha Hadid RA’s sudden death in Miami has sent ripples across the world. Her influence and renown stretched far beyond the architectural community, with her buildings – perhaps most famously, London’s Olympic Aquatic Centre – capturing popular imagination. This Iraq-born architect inspired first with her paintings and drawings, and when she was finally given the opportunity to build she produced work which was truly visionary.
    Her architecture is keenly intellectual and equally emotionally and creatively charged. Elected a Royal Academician in 2005, she is pioneering figure; the only woman to receive the Pritzker Prize (2004) and the RIBA Gold Medal this year, again the first time to a woman in her own right. As fellow Academician and long-time friend Peter Cook said in his Gold Medal citation of Zaha, she was “larger than life, bold as brass and certainly on the case. Our Heroine.”
  • Alan Stanton RA, architect and Chair of the Architecture Committee

    Zaha Hadid was a force of nature. Her creative power and strong personality pushed architecture into a new territory that, not only produced seminal buildings, but raised public awareness and encouraged debate about the very nature of architecture.
    Although Zaha had the courage to work “on the edge” of mainstream architecture (which she freely admitted was the best place to be) over recent years her practice received an increasing number of accolades and important commissions and she was building more and more. The news of her death will have come as a profound shock to architects everywhere and her presence within the world of architecture will be hugely missed.

Peter Cook RA, architect





Peter Cook RA wrote the following tribute in February, when Hadid was presented with the RIBA’s 2016 Royal Gold Medal.
In our current culture of ticking every box, surely Zaha Hadid succeeds, since (to quote the Royal Gold Medal criteria) she is someone “who has made a significant contribution to the theory or practice of architecture… for a substantial body of work rather than for work which is currently fashionable.” Indeed her work, though full of form, style and unstoppable mannerism, possesses a quality that some of us might refer to as an impeccable “eye”: which we would claim is a fundamental in the consideration of special architecture and is rarely satisfied by mere “fashion”.
And surely her work is special. For three decades now, she has ventured where few would dare: if Paul Klee took a line for a walk, then Zaha took the surfaces that were driven by that line out for a virtual dance and then deftly folded them over and then took them out for a journey into space. In her earlier, “spiky” period there was already a sense of vigour that she shared with her admired Russian Suprematists and Constructivists – attempting with them to capture that elusive dynamic of movement at the end of the machine age.
Necessarily having to disperse effort through a studio production, rather than being a lone artist, she cottoned–on to the potential of the computer to turn space upon itself. Indeed there is an Urban Myth that suggests that the very early Apple Mac “boxes” were still crude enough to plot the mathematically unlikely – and so Zaha with her mathematics background seized upon this and made those flying machine projections of the Hong Kong Peak project and the like. Meanwhile, with paintings and special small drawings Zaha continued to lead from the front. She has also been smart enough to pull in some formidable computational talent without being phased by its ways.
Thus the evolution of the “flowing” rather than spikey architecture crept up upon us in stages, as did the scale of her commissions, but in most cases, they remained clear in identity and control. When you entered the Fire Station at Vitra, you were conscious of being inside one of those early drawings and yes, it could be done. Yet at perhaps its highest, those of us lucky enough to see the Heydar Aliyev Center in Baku in the flesh, can surely never have been in such a dream-like space, with its totality, its enormous internal ramp and dart-like lights seeming to have come from a vocabulary that lies so far beyond the normal architecture that we assess or rationalise.