How Zaha Hadid Revolutionized The Way Architects Design

Zaha Hadid's buildings are complex, surprising,

and entirely unique,

and it turns out so is her process for designing them.

I'm Michael Wyetzner, I'm an architect,

and today we're going to discover

how Zaha Hadid designs a building

and what makes her process so revolutionary.

[ethereal music]

Zaha Hadid is famous for breathtaking designs

that seem to defy logic and sometimes even gravity.

But while her buildings are undoubtedly eye-catching,

unprecedented, and complex,

it's not the buildings themselves

that are the most revolutionary thing about her legacy.

In fact, it was how she went about designing the building

that changed the way we think about architecture.

So let's talk about her design process,

beginning with the project that inspired her

to rethink what was possible.

This is called Malevich's Tektonik

and Zaha Hadid painted it as part of her fourth year thesis

at the Architectural Association in London.

Her teachers at the time, Rem Koolhaas and Elia Zenghelis,

challenged their students

to use the revolutionary painter Malevich's work

as the basis for a project proposal.

The assignment would profoundly change Zaha

and the way she thought about architecture.

To understand why, let's back up and talk

about what made Malevich revolutionary as a painter.

Broadly speaking, there are two types of art:

objective and non-objective.

Objective art is representational.

A chair looks like a chair. A flower looks like a flower.

It is showing us recognizable things in a recognizable way.

Even cubism falls into this category.

A distorted face still reads as a face,

It never becomes truly abstract.

Non-objective art by contrast,

it's not representational at all.

It is abstract.

It is an exercise in pure expression by the artist.

And at the time that Malevich was working,

abstract art was a brand new idea.

He was at the forefront of developing the entire concept

of non-objective art

in a movement that he called Suprematism.

The name comes from the idea that his art was concerned

with the supremacy of pure feeling

as opposed to the representation of the real world,

which is basically what art was up until that point.

And to support this focus on feeling,

his art was characterized by simple geometric shapes

and a limited color palette

and rejected realistic representation entirely.

So how does this relate to Zaha's thesis project?

In her own words, she was inspired by Malevich's art

to rethink design.

She said Art used to be re-presentation

rather than creation.

Abstraction opened the possibility of unfettered invention.

She also said, I felt limited by the poverty

of the traditional system of drawing in architecture

and was searching for a new means of representation.

So she began to experiment

with abstraction inspired by Malevich's art.

So Malevich created these sculptural objects

he called arkhitektons.

which were essentially these 3D objects

that took his ideas of shapes that he used in his paintings

and turned them into a 3D piece.

The assignment that Koolhaas

and Zenghelis gave their students

was to use this arkhitekton

as the basis for a design for a real-world building.

So let's look at this painting that she has created.

So this painting is intended to read as a presentation

of a hotel and apartment complex

built across Hungerford Bridge in London.

This is far from a typical rendering of a building.

For one thing, it's abstracted.

It mixes perspectives of two dimensions

and three dimensions.

Like Malevich, it uses very simple geometric shapes.

So you see it in 3D over here.

You see silhouettes of it over here,

and they're flying by creating movement.

It's almost as if someone threw it

and it's just hurling through space.

And my favorite part of this is she takes all these pieces,

which sort of is exactly what Malevich was doing.

So if we look at Malevich's

Suprematist Composition 1915,

what you see in this painting are these three

very strong black shapes

floating on essentially a blank white background.

And then under that are these floating array

of red rectangles, lines, and squares.

And you could see how those shapes here

become these shapes here,

and these shapes become the arkhitekton.

And then she's taking that one step further,

and according to her assignment,

is taking that arkhitekton

and is turning it into a building.

Zaha Hadid has spoken

of how this project opened up new ways of thinking for her.

But this was only the beginning for Zaha,

who would continued to explore this process

throughout her career.

One of the first projects that she became known for

was her winning entry for The Peak,

an architectural competition for a private club

at the top of a mountain in Kowloon Hong Kong.

So this is a painting she composed

for part of her award-winning entry into this competition.

And what I love about this painting

is that she shows the whole city and then the mountain

and buildings off in the distance.

And then the very top, there's her project, The Peak,

near the peak of this mountain.

So essentially what she's showing is not only her project

in relation to the rest of the city,

which is very much like the Malevich idea

of showing the shapes in relation to one another,

but she's also showing that her idea

for the building grows out of the mountain.

It almost looks like it's part of the mountain.

[mellow music]

And these are some of the paintings

and drawings she did as part of the design process.

So I love these drawings

because they're half plan, half painting,

and they almost have a feel of Arabic script writing

as part of them.

Quite often she would begin the idea for a project

with these calligraphic drawings,

these sort of pieces of calligraphy and form.

And then she would move from there into painting

to further refine the idea,

and it would evolve eventually into a building.

So this project was never built,

but she used a lot of these ideas in later projects,

and you could see how those sketches

we were just looking at before evolve into the building.

So looking at this,

you could see ideas that Malevich had here,

but unlike Malevich, whose forms never really overlapped,

this is more reminiscent of El Lissitzky

who was Malevich's protege in a lot of ways.

For El Lissitzky, the idea

of expressing personal emotions through art was not enough.

So he aligned himself

with a movement known as Constructivism,

which was based in Russia,

and founded by Vladimir Tatlin and Alexander Rodchenko.

While Suprematism viewed art

as a spiritual and emotional experience,

Constructivism saw it as a tool for social progress.

El Lissitzky even wrote a children's book

called About 2 Squares,

which used the artistic language of Suprematism

to question the societal order of the day,

and which is still considered

an important work in graphic design.

Constructivism took the floating compositions of Malevich

and joined the geometric shapes together

in a way that could be used

as a basis for functional design.

This meant that the art of the Constructivist movement

could have practical applications in architecture.

But the concept he explored

that would prove most influential to Zaha Hadid

was the idea of the fourth dimension.

Einstein at this time was a great inspiration for many,

and he had been exploring the idea of the fourth dimension.

Essentially, if one dimension is a line,

and two dimensions is a plane,

and three dimensions is a cube,

then the fourth dimension adds the element of time.

And essentially, architecture always has had the element

of time embedded in it 'cause we move through it

and once there's movement, there's time.

In its most famous works, Prouns, which is an acronym

for Project for the Affirmation of the New in Russian,

El Lissitzky wanted to create a visual illusion

that would transcend the flat surface,

attempting to imply this unseen dimension of time

that was beyond human perception.

To achieve this, he used several artistic techniques,

which later also appear in the designs of Zaha Hadid,

floating geometric forms, multiple vanishing points,

dynamic perspectives and overlapping planes,

which at times appear to defy gravity.

You can see this idea of the fourth dimension

beginning to come into play in Zaha's architecture

with the MAXXI Museum in Rome.

So this is the MAXXI Museum.

You could see from this overhead

that that idea of calligraphy

is still very much present in the design of this project.

These forms almost feel like some form of writing.

So when you compare this to her original sketches

for the museum, which you see here,

you get the idea of this sort of movement,

which she then intends for people

to move through her museum.

But to really get a sense of the movement of her buildings,

you need to look at them from the interior.

So this is a view inside the MAXXI Museum.

So how does one express four dimensions?

How does one express the element of time within a building?

So Zaha had this idea that she spoke about

that she wants people

to experience the interiors of her buildings

through the idea of these choices that we make.

So she offers different paths through the same space

with the idea that, depending on the path you pick,

it affects the way you'll experience the building.

And I think one could say

that's her expression of the fourth dimension,

the way you move through the building,

the element of time,

is very much part of how she looked at design.

So just like the way you really can't see

the end of the space

or the beginning of the space in this photograph,

it's almost like the way one experiences time

that you can't see the end, the beginning's very hazing,

and you wind your way through the space.

So let's just talk about this interior for a second.

So this red line and these black forms

that are the stairway and the upper walkway,

they are in direct contrast to the surrounding white walls

and gray of the concrete and the white floor.

So it creates this Constructivist Supremacist composition.

And then she expresses the movement of the ceiling above

with these fins, these parallel fins, these baffles,

and those move with the shape of the building

as you wind your way through.

So another idea that Zaha explored was the idea

that all representational drawing is an illusion,

and that includes the way we draw buildings

and the way that they're depicted on the page.

One of the most fundamental ideas in art is representation.

How do we draw or paint something in two dimensions

in a way that best resembles what we see with our eyes?

And one of the main inventions of representational art

is what's known as perspectival drawing or perspective.

Ancient civilizations like the Greeks and Romans

used rudimentary techniques to create depth in their art.

However, it was during the Italian Renaissance

in the 15th century that linear perspective

was formally developed and codified.

Filippo Brunelleschi, an architect, is credited

with pioneering the mathematical principles of perspective.

His methods were then refined later

by artists like Leon Battista Alberti,

who wrote De Pictura in 1435,

a treatise outlining the rules of perspective in art.

So let's get technical for a second,

but in a very rudimentary way.

If one were drawing a simple one-point perspective,

you start with a horizon line,

then you pick a vanishing point,

and then if you are gonna draw a frame,

draw the parallel lines,

converge at that vanishing point, which is this.

And so a person would be standing right here,

and we've basically just drawn a room, right?

And here's a person standing in the room in silhouette.

That's the real basics of what a one-point perspective is.

So all those lines converge to this vanishing point,

but this is an illusion, right?

In essence, what I've really drawn is four trapezoids,

and here's one of 'em.

It's actually a shape.

It appears like it's going off into space,

but it's not 'cause it's on the page.

So it's an illusion what we've drawn.

It creates the illusion of depth.

Then there's two-point perspective.

Two-point perspective takes that same idea

with a horizon line,

but it introduces two vanishing points,

so that if you had a cube,

they go back to that vanishing point

the same way.

And again, that appears to be a three-dimensional object,

but in fact, one could just look at it

as two trapezoids touching one another.

That's perspective in a very, very simplified way.

Then there's these other types

of three-dimensional drawing in architecture.

One is called axonometric, one is called isometric.

Axonometric takes a square like that,

and then projects lines.

And that also reads like a three-dimensional object.

So what this does is it takes an exact representation

of what's drawn in the plan,

the exact dimensions and the exact shape,

and then it just projects lines

to make it look three dimensional.

Then an isometric takes that same piece in the plan

and makes it illusionistic.

So really what's happening is,

this is a true 90-degree angle, right?

But in isometric, it's a false angle.

This is actually drawn at 120 degrees and 30 degrees.

But in our mind, we read this as a 90-degree angle.

So the axonometric drawing takes the actual 90-degree shape

and then projects.

The isometric adds illusion to that top plane.

So the top square looks as if it's been rotated,

but we still read it as a square.

In fact, we read all three sides as a square

to make this cube.

But in reality, it's just a hexagon

divided into three rhombuses.

It's an illusion.

And so in addition to artistic renderings

of a completed buildings, which use perspective

to depict what the building will look like,

architects also draw plans, sections,

and elevations with no three-dimensional representation,

which builders use to construct the building.

But Zaha liked to play with this idea a little.

She would take these distorted shapes

that one sees in an isometric, for instance,

and she would put those into her plans.

So the shapes that make up the illusions of a cube,

for instance, would actually become the shapes

that make up her plans and elevations.

And a good example of this are the plans she devised

for the BMW Center in Germany.

This is the floor plan of the building.

This is actually what the builders will build from.

But at the same time, what Zaha has done,

which I find to be really clever

and cheeky at the same time, is she's injected the illusion

of 3D into the two-dimensional drawing.

So this appears to be a square that we're looking at

as a three-dimensional object, but it's not.

It's just a rhombus.

So she's taken that shape, which is a rhombus,

and she's using it as

the shape of a room here in this plan.

So if we spin the plan around,

we can draw this same exact piece

that we just were looking at before.

So right there, that's an example

of what she was depicting in her plan,

which is a radical idea.

So in effect, she's taking an illusion and making it real.

And so when you're in it, it feels distorted

because these walls are not at right angles to each other.

She's injecting this three-dimensional illusion

into this two-dimensional drawing,

and then it becomes a three-dimensional space.

So another example of how she plays with distortion

is at her first built project,

which is the Vitra Fire Station in Germany.

So her idea for this building

was all about sort of frozen action.

And her idea, because it was a fire station,

that at any moment the building would spring into action

and it would be this explosion of movement.

And so what she does is she takes these shapes

like this one, which or could read as a rectangle

that's been distorted

because a light was projected against it,

and the this would be the shadow

that would be revealed from that projection.

And then she builds that shape.

And all the walls and everything in this building,

very few things are actually at right angles.

The walls are canted, the canopy is slanting up,

the edge of the wall is cut at a slant.

And again, all to reinforce this idea

of an explosion of movement.

But when one looks at these shapes

from a different point of view,

like you do here,

all of a sudden it's completely different.

This is such a great contrast

because this shape is this shape.

It's the same exact canopy.

So it's really this brilliant sort of play

on shape and form

that was, up until this point, not really explored.

And she created this whole idea through the idea of drawing

and painting and creating these different ways

of looking at buildings and designing them.

So by combining an artistic sensibility to representation

and an abstraction of the design process itself,

Zaha was able to make some of the world's most unique

and breathtaking buildings,

of which we've only looked at very, very few.

So I love the way that she combined

this idea of art and architecture

and created something completely different

and something completely new.

And she did an amazing amount

of these fantastic paintings in her earlier years

that are really great works of art.

She passed away way too soon in 2016,

but she set herself apart as an artist

and an architect that truly believed in the power of design

to create spaces which could improve the lives

and experiences of anyone who came in contact with them.

So what's your favorite Zaha Hadid building?

Let us know in the comments below.