Drawing and reality: fragmented realities
The fifth post in my series on ‘drawing and reality’, focusing on Zaha Hadid’s Drawing of IBA Housing scheme, Berlin, 1986
The final drawing I want to look at is this by Zaha Hadid: for an IBA Housing scheme in Berlin, made in 1986, with the project completing in 1993 — one of her first but least known built projects. The drawing is relatively pared back in contrast to her more geometrically complex drawing and paintings from the this period. We get a clear (though tilted) horizon line from which the wedge-shape form of the building emerges, its curves and elongated perspective giving it a tangible dynamism and energy as if it is somehow forcibly breaking free from the ground plane.
Although it focuses almost entirely on the proposed building, the drawing is clearly of a piece with Zaha’s more famous drawings/paintings of the period, where, for example in the case of the Peak in Hong Kong, a whole city is turned in a fragmented landscape of apparently distorted forms and structures. The formal precedents in the work of the Russian Constructivists are well known, yet these drawings/paintings are at the same time inseparable from their own moment, dramatically figuring the fragmentation of reality during the 1980s that was concomitant with the overturning of grand narratives, the unbridled free market, post-industrialisation, mass consumption, de-urbanisation, globalisation, ubiquitous TV, the desktop PC and the global saturation of images. The proposal for IBA Housing is a project which accepts, sits within and to large degree reflects this fragmented reality — a clear rejection of the attempts of modernism (and classicism before it) to try to impose order on reality. Insofar as Zaha looks to history and the avant-garde, she does so stripped of its revolutionary politics (and in this regard we might regard this stage of Zaha’s career as postmodern in sensibility).
As I mentioned just now, this project is one of the exceptions among Zaha’s early works in that it was actually completed. While the building in this photograph is recognisably the one in the drawing, it appears far more normative, shed of its urgent dynamism. Indeed, it is arguable whether Zaha’s buildings ever did convey the essence of those early drawings/paintings. As has been frequently noted, this was partly about building technology not being able to keep up with her tireless vision, and indeed, whether some of her designs would ever be buildable. The Vitra Fire Station was the exception that proved the role, surprising people by actually capturing the drawing, but at the same time being built in an context with exceptional economic structures that literally hold it up.
It is ironic in retrospect that once it became possible to realise the types of structures that Zaha designed in the 1980s, her work changed to be more about form-making and exploring the potential of those advances in building technology. Even so, looking at those early drawing/paintings over 30 years later, there remains the overriding impression that the only form of architecture that could reflect the fragmentation reality was that which existed on the page.
Continued in my next post…
© Owen Hopkins 2018
