this was zaha hadid's fourth year thesis project at the AA it's a painting called malevich tectonic
the painting is the reason zaha builds the way she builds you can draw a straight line from here
straight to her first project and consequently every project since this academic work of zaha
hadid laid the foundations for one of the biggest architecture firms in the history
of the world but the story of this project is not as simple as it may seem it is a story that
involves a fight with the art world a struggle for liberation and a redefining of what architectural
representation means i know it seems weird when i put it like that so let me explain it further
welcome to blessedarch and today we are looking at zaha hadid's thesis project
the painting behind is called the malevich tectonic which is uh was a name of the project
which we did in my fourth year okay so let's take a closer look at this painting this is the river
themes in london and the structure that you see is a hotel proposed on the river the form of this
hotel was actually developed by a russian artist called kazimir malevich and zaha used that form
and reimagined it as a 14 story hotel of course this painting was not all she produced she made
proper plans and sections for this hotel as well and we will look at all of them in greater detail
but i want to come to an important question first why would zaha use somebody else's form
and put functions in it and what is it about this painting do these elements hold any meaning at all
to answer this question we need to take a moment to talk about the inspiration behind
this painting it all is actually a consequence of an art exhibition that happened back in 1915 an
exhibition that got such strong reactions of hate and love that it shook the world of art
at this time in the world of art and painting fauvism impressionism and cubism were pretty
dominant it was also a time where changes were happening all over the world i mean the world
wars were happening monarchies and governments all over the world were shaking up especially
in russia kazimir malevich was a russian artist who was most active at the beginning of the 20th
century over his painting career he worked in a variety of styles over several decades
in the art world it was the time of picasso and brac and the cubist movement a young malevich had
become highly inspired and had started adopting cubism and futurism in his work he was at the
time of well-respected and a reputed painter but now he felt a need for change so he did what any
rational person would do just invented a new style of painting what say what say what say say what
in 1915 kazimir malevich presented his abstract paintings at the 0.10 exhibition in pathograph
which is now called saint petersburg it was a revolutionary show that forced entirely new forms
of experimentation and expression these simple paintings of squares and rectangles and crosses
were actually very very radical for the time no more 3d no more depth no
more imitation of something these paintings were not necessarily of a particular object
just simplicity so with this exhibition he published a manifesto declaring his
new style of painting a style that has done away with the imitation of reality in depth
a style that is about abstraction about simplicity and purity he called it sublimatism
post his declaration of this new style his paintings look like this
if these feel familiar it is because this is what inspired zahadi to create her thesis project
okay so let's come back to the painting by zahadi the 1970s when this painting was made
were a critical time at the time architects did not have that much work but they were
productive with drawings in zaha's own words one result of my interest in malevich was my
decision to employ painting as a design tool i found the traditional systems of architectural
drawing to be limiting and was searching for a new means of representation studying
malevich allowed me to develop abstraction as an investigative principle so let's keep these
two side by side on one hand we have a young artist trying to invent a new form of painting
he is tired of the current norms and trends and wants to free himself through abstraction
on the other hand we have zahadi a young arab girl in a profession largely dominated by men at a time
when architectural representation is rigid she wants to be free of her constraints and work with
space in a more abstract form this was her primary reason for moving towards malevich and suprematism
the freedom it provided her from everything around her okay so let's analyze this painting a bit
so as i told you this is the river thames and this is the hungerford bridge on this bridge
is the hotel that zaha proposed we will talk about its form and the internal plans in detail in a bit
so zara used this painting to explore something she called layering so layering is basically how
it sounds the initial composition is explored in terms of layers and depth some elements go
back some come up some go in the front and with this element of depth a 2d composition of shapes
becomes a so-called 3d composition of volumes we see the use of these colors white black red and
these are used to make variations of the layered structures in the bottom right in the center and
in the top of the painting another thing hadid explored in this painting was fragmentation she
used it in the separation of layers as well as in the bits and pieces of smaller geometric shapes
in the lower left of the painting these are basically all the elements that make up this
composition floating freely in space it is also to sort of break away from the constraints that were
put on architectural representation the painting truly focused on the exploration of this form from
all sides you might then say that this becomes more of an artwork than an actual representation
for the building and you might be right but this wasn't just a method to showcase the project to
other people i will let zha hadid explain this better and playing an excerpt from a
bbc documentary on malevich and i felt that all these things i discovered was through abstraction
because i have understood like i could read the abstract drawing but it was the first
time i realized actually how my mind worked and how i can resolve a problem because before that
like most students and i always would do the same like stare at your board from days to have an idea
and i realize you have to really organize your thinking the tectonic is the one in the middle
with shadows around it the pieces which are around the painting so one is seeing it from a plan view
and one is saying it from an area view of course it was very influenced by all the
paintings by malevich by the suprematus and by other abstract pieces the whole alia block color
and also fragmentation okay so let's talk about the form that za hadid used to create her hotel
the form that she borrowed from malevich so after exploring the 2d canvas malevich wanted
to explore suprematism as a 3d composition and he started creating these plaster models
that he called architectons these unambiguously architectural forms could be airplanes houses
buildings or cities as malay which put it it could also be sputniks anywhere between earth
and the moon one of these experimental pieces was called alpha architecture which he made in 1923.
it is this form that zahadid has incorporated into her hotel what malevich did in his experiments was
he moved from a 2d surface to a 3d one from shapes and compositions to volumes zaha used
these volumes and returned to the opposite direction she took this 3d volume and went
back to the medium of painting in doing so she injected this given form with a new found function
hadid once wrote the idea was to impose malevich's structure architect on alpha on an urban context
to become architecture my project imposed it on london's hungerford bridge on the themes
in a series of horizontal layers this system of drawing led to new ideas such as layering
drawings one over another like a reverse form of archaeology which led to literal translations in
the building a little example of this is the vitra fire station in germany the very first project
that zahadi built in this particular structure the drawing became the project when lines became
volumes so think of it this way usually when you are designing you have your project or 3d in mind
and you create drawings for the project but here it was the drawing the abstract sketch that ended
up being the final project okay it's time let's look at the thesis in detail and here i will be
adding a bit of my own analysis to the project as well the design is a hotel which sits over the
hungerford bridge and adds an architectural bridge between the 19th century london and south bank the
project consists of 14 levels which systematically follow and adhere to the volumes of the original
tectonic turning all apparent limitations into possibilities so the question now arises why
would zaha take this pre-existing form and try to fit a function inside it so here is my take on it
i don't know if you've ever tried working on a project where there are no constraints no bylaws
no client interference nothing that can help you drive and in turn define your design it can be
maddening so as limiting as it sounds to turn a sculpture into hotel without making any changes
it is also liberating because within that defined path you can design new functions i think it is
also symbolic of creating new architecture within the constraints of what is already
built and existing i mean that is what we do as architects think of it like creating something new
amidst the old framework okay so now in this project zaha also creates a club the club is
located on levels seven and eight and these are separately detailed out by zaha let's hear zaha
talk about a project for a bit from this excerpt from her talk at the tate modern so the idea
was to as i said to kind of really invade this object with a program and the two things would
occur here is the idea of the supercomposition of uh clear water which was in the tectonic or the
dirty water of the uh of the thames so the top fla slab was water and then there was a kind of pool
a pool house or a sauna or whatever and then the rest of it is apartments and hotels i originally
did this in my fourth year i was i don't have the drawings unfortunately but there were
atrocious and i was teased about them for many years but the idea was there the idea of the
shipwreck as a way to design this nightclub and i came back to this project a year later to design
the nightclub as a shipwreck so this is this going through to uh two things layering horizontally
and then also going slicing through the object uh you know vertically we go back to all these
different elements which was like exclusive corpus but it's not and showing that the
hotel at the top then apartments the all the kind of parking and so on next space
and then we began we began interpretation of how uh these objects begin to arrive on the site next
and then we moved on to that the project of zaha and the study of malay which is work in general
helped free her from a lot of dogmas and constraints that people had created for her
for architectural representation and for the profession of architecture in general as zaha
went ahead in her career especially in the early years she used the medium of painting to create
beautiful spaces and she let the abstract guide the project a huge example of this is the peak a
project that she had won but it never got built since malevich had been such a huge inspiration
for her it was also a very happy coincidence that when she was awarded the pritzker in 2004
the prize ceremony took place in saint petersburg russia where malevich lived and worked and where
all those years ago in 1915 he had put up the exhibition that changed the art world forever