Origins of Field Space

Tim Tocci / Prof. Rihab Bagnole / ARTH 701: Contemporary Art / 11.11.2010

ORIGINS OF FIELD SPACE An Exploration of Zaha Hadid’s Inspiration

BIO

1950 BORN IN BAGHDAD 1963 BA’ATH PARTY RISES 1977 GRADUATED AA 1980 ZHA FOUNDED 1983 THE POINT 1993 VITRA FIRE 1994 CARDIFF BAY 1997 WINS MAXXI 2001 STRASBOURG FINISHED 2004 PRITZKER AWARD 2007 AIA AWARD 2009 MAXXI OPENS

Abu Dhabi Performing Arts Centre / 2007-2012

THESIS Analogies from tectonic faults, geological systems, and more recently, organic systems (Schumacher 29) More primal systems > Cosmology Quantum Mechanics / Special Relativity / General Relativity

Strasbourg Tram Terminus / 2001

WHAT IS A FIELD? “Fragmentation and flow come together in the idea of the field.” - Hadid “...spaces of a geometry that seem more related to quantum mechanics than to Euclid.”

- Peter Noever

IT’S NOT A GRID

Abu Dhabi Performing Arts Centre

IT’S NOT A GRID2007-2012

Abu Dhabi Performing Arts Centre

IT’S NOT A GRID2007-2012

Abu Dhabi Performing Arts Centre

IT’S NOT A GRID2007-2012

Abu Dhabi Performing Arts Centre

IT’S NOT A GRID2007-2012

Abu Dhabi Performing Arts Centre

IT’S NOT A GRID2007-2012

Abu Dhabi Performing Arts Centre 2007-2012

Nordpark Railway / 2007

WHAT IS SPACE? “The resultant graphic space greatly anticipates the later...concepts of field and swarm. The effect is very much like the effects currently pursued with...digitally simulated “gravitational fields” that grip, align, orient, and thus cohere a set of elements or particles with the digital model” - Patrik Schumacher

Lotus / Installation for Venice Exhibit 2010

WHAT IS SPACE? “The dynamism in Hadid’s work develops through the conventional signs of planes, but describes the planes of future three-dimensional bodies. At a certain moment...Hadid’s work...explodes in the threedimensional time of the new architectural construction.”

- Gordana Fontana-Giusti

MORE THAN PLANES + VOLUMES

“...Zaha Hadid has painted of cities and buildings bending in the throes of Einsteinian warp...”

-Joseph Giovannini

MORE THAN PLANES + VOLUMES

“...Zaha Hadid has painted of cities and buildings bending in the throes of Einsteinian warp...”

-Joseph Giovannini

Strasbourg Tram Terminus / 2001

STRASBOURG TRAM TERMINUS “This latent shift in the definition of architecture from matter to energy becomes ultimately explicit in one of her most recent buildings, the Strasbourg tram terminus.�

- Gordana Fontana-Giusti

Strasbourg Tram Terminus / 2001

STRASBOURG TRAM TERMINUS “The overall concept towards the planning of the car park and the station is one of overlapping fields and lines that knit together to form a constantly shifting whole. Those ‘fields’ are the patterns of movement engendered by cars, trams, bicycles and pedestrians. Each has a trajectory and a trace, as well as a static fixture” - Andreas Ruby

Strasbourg Tram Terminus / 2001

STRASBOURG TRAM TERMINUS “The notion of the cars as being ephemeral and constantly changing elements on the site is manifested as a ‘magnetic field’ of white lines on the black tarmac.”

- Andreas Ruby

Strasbourg Tram Terminus / 2001

STRASBOURG TRAM TERMINUS “The specially articulated transition between open landscape and public interior space is designed to evoke a new idea of “artificial nature” that blurs the boundaries between natural and artificial environments and thus improves the quality of civic life in Strasbourg.”

- Andreas Ruby

Strasbourg Tram Terminus / 2001

STRASBOURG TRAM TERMINUS “It is a territorial graffiti that combines the field-like inscription of the surface in Walter de Maria’s Lightning Field with the physical treatment of territory in Michael Heizer’s Double Negative and the diagrammatic optics of the asphalt ground in Ed Ruscha’s aerial photographs of L.A. parking lots. It’s a landscape ready for takeoff” - Andreas Ruby

MAXXI / 2009

MAXXI “The city flows inwards while the project flows outwards.” – Pio Baldi “She calls the project 'a field more than an object...‘” – Rowan Moore

MAXXI / 2009

MAXXI “The design generates what Hadid calls 'confluence, interference and turbulence', and there is no single route through the building. There are loops and dead ends, some of which seem intended, others not”

– Rowan Moore

MAXXI / 2009

MAXXI “The premise of the architectural design promotes a disinheriting of the ‘object’ oriented gallery space. Instead, the notion of a ‘drift’ takes on an embodied form.”

- Patrik Schumacher

MAXXI / 2009

MAXXI “Merging the weightlessness of planetary architecture with the ground’s gravitational downforce, this space invokes the ‘heavy hovering’ so eloquently pictured in countless science-fiction movies.”

– Andreas Ruby

MAXXI / 2009

CONCLUSION With the rise of relativism and scientific achievement, society has fewer concrete definitions of its existence and its origins. Through the application of field space, Hadid seeks to remind visitors of their place within a place—in other words, the origins of their identity in the context of a vast and expanding universe.