How Zaha Hadid Revolutionized Architecture & Drew Inspiration from Russian Avant-Garde Art

Zaha Hadid died in 2016, at the age of 65. She cer­tain­ly was­n’t old, by the stan­dards of our time, though in most pro­fes­sions, her best work­ing years would already have been behind her. She was, how­ev­er, an archi­tect, and by age 65, most archi­tects are still very much in their prime. Take Rem Kool­haas, who today remains a leader of the Office of Met­ro­pol­i­tan Archi­tec­ture in his eight­ies — and who, back in the sev­en­ties, was one of Hadid’s teach­ers at the Archi­tec­tur­al Asso­ci­a­tion School of Archi­tec­ture in Lon­don. It was there that Kool­haas gave his promis­ing, uncon­ven­tion­al stu­dent the assign­ment of bas­ing a project on the art of Kaz­imir Male­vich.

Specif­i­cal­ly, as archi­tect Michael Wyet­zn­er explains in the new Archi­tec­tur­al Digest video above, Hadid had to adapt one of Male­vich’s “arkhitek­tons,” which were “objects that took his ideas of shapes that he used in his paint­ings” — the most wide­ly known among them being Black Square, from 1915, pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture — “and turned them into a 3D piece.”

To under­stand Hadid’s for­ma­tion, then, we must go back to the ear­ly-twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry Rus­sia in which Male­vich oper­at­ed as an avant-garde artist, and in which he launched the move­ment he called Supre­ma­tism, whose name reflects “the idea that his art was con­cerned with the suprema­cy of pure feel­ing, as opposed to the rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the real world.”

As a pio­neer of “non-objec­tive” art, Male­vich did his part to inspire Hadid on her path to design­ing build­ings that come as close to abstrac­tion as tech­no­log­i­cal­ly pos­si­ble. In fact, dur­ing the ini­tial phas­es of Hadid’s career, what we think of as her sig­na­ture curve-inten­sive archi­tec­tur­al style — exem­pli­fied by build­ings like the Lon­don Aquat­ics Cen­tre and the Dong­dae­mun Design Plaza in Seoul — was­n’t tech­no­log­i­cal­ly pos­si­ble. Exam­in­ing her ear­ly paint­ings, such as the one of the arkhitek­ton-based bridge hotel she turned in to Kool­haas, or her first built projects like the Vit­ra Fire Sta­tion in Weil am Rhein, shows us how her ideas were already evolv­ing in direc­tions then prac­ti­cal­ly unthink­able in archi­tec­ture. Zaha Hadid has now been gone near­ly a decade, but her field is in many ways still catch­ing up with her.

Relat­ed con­tent:

An Intro­duc­tion to the World-Renowned Archi­tect Zaha Hadid, “the Queen of the Curve”

The ABC of Archi­tects: An Ani­mat­ed Flip­book of Famous Archi­tects and Their Best-Known Build­ings

What Makes Kaz­imir Malevich’s Black Square (1915) Not Just Art, But Impor­tant Art

Every­thing You Need to Know About Mod­ern Russ­ian Art in 25 Min­utes: A Visu­al Intro­duc­tion to Futur­ism, Social­ist Real­ism & More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.