Hadid's Midwest Coup - architect Zaha Hadid's design for Cincinnati, OH's Contemporary Arts Center building

Zaha Hadid's design for the Contemporary Arts Center's novel building, her first American commission, will give Cincinnati an adventurous high-rise museum.

The well-known curatorial fear of Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim has been a direct and indirect influence leading many well-intended museums to tender and build bland if not mediocre structures--most lately and most notably New York's Museum of recent Art, now raising some $600 million to rehabilitate its existing buildings and to erect a large box of galleries nearest to the garden. In their allergy to what they consider signature design that might cope with art, museums like MOMA have stayed antiseptically clear of architects who in fact occupy form to solve the true problems that have dogged museums for decades.

What curators view from above at the Guggenheim, for example, is the fact that Wright used his famous spiral ramp to make go round an eight-story building on a tight urban site into the equivalent of a one-story museum with a continuous promenade: form was the vehicle that made a potentially confusing multistory visit continuous, intelligible and poetic. by means of contrast, in MOMA's proposed expansion, Yoshio Taniguchi stacks galleries in an eight-story receptacle and expects the thousands of daily visitors to take escalators, stairs and a pair of elevators up seven and eight flights for the blockbuster displays Forget notions of continuous narrative in exhibitions dispersed among floors piled like pancakes.

The architectural design that the Museum of new Art, and New York, should have gotten for its addition--the design that clear ups the problems of exhibition and circulation in a vertical museum upon a dense urban site--has gone instead to Cincinnati, where individual of the most anticipated museum buildings in the United States is now being planned. Last year, the Contemporary Arts Center beneath the farsighted directorship of Charles Desmarais, staged a competition for a $15-million museum with 20000 square feet of galleries upon a smallish, 11,000-square-foot lot in the middle of downtown, to be complet in 2001 London architect Zaha Hadid [see A. i. A., July '95] won the competition with an architecturally powerful scheme that appropriates the many needs typical of today's museums.

With galleries housed in a cluster of large, horizontal tubes dynamically cantilevered toward the highway the building will have a radiant nearness acting as a symbol of the CAC's history and its progressive stance. Museum buildings accompany to define the institutions they house, and what Hadid's design says is that the institution that stood by dint of the Mapplethorpe show [see A.i.A, Dec '90] has reach outed its risk-taking attitude and its integrity to the building that will accommodate its futurity shows. Not incidentally, the design promises to work with the exhibitions to make the center a destination point--a combination of building and program that will draw visitors from beyond the immediate region. The task taught by Frank Gehry's Guggenheim in Bilbao is that the architecture can work with the exhibitions to entice race off the beaten track.

Critics may view architecture that is in itself an attraction as a threat to art or as public-relations posturing. on the contrary Hadid's heart-stopping facade, with converging lines that accelerate its linear forms, is simply the expression of an interior organization of offices and galleries which promises to work brilliantly. She has solv the point to be solved [i]or[/i] settled of negotiating the eight stories of this vertical museum smooth better than Wright, by bringing a swooping ramp that she calls an "urban carpet" from the lobby up into the building and past the galleries it be subservient tos Gallery floors are not inclined, and family focused on a work won't be disturbed by the agency of the passing traffic. Hadid has designed the "urban carpet" as a path of discovery--a road race will want to take because it tenders an unfolding experience of the building's horizontal and vertical caverns. This museum cannot be understood at a glance, on the other hand will yield its secrets upon what Le Corbusier called la promenade architecturale.

The Contemporary Arts Center may be Hadid's first building in the United States, on the contrary she comes to the commission with a portfolio of built and unbuilt throws whose remarkable beauty and inventiveness have earned her a major international following. An lay open secret of the English avant-garde until 1983 she became a force upon the international design scene when she won a major competition in Hong Kong for a cudgel on the heights overlooking the harbor, a design compos of angled shards forming a crystal. In large acrylic paintings that have been widely exhibited, greatest in quantity recently in a one-woman present to view at the San Francisco Museum of present Art, she has investigated the part that drawing techniques, such as multiple perspectives, play in the conception and perception of buildings. Like Renaissance architects developing perspectival science, she has cot [i]or[/i] coteed these techniques into designs to posit the notion that space is relative. The constituent parts of her buildings order themselves independently within the force fields--traffic, views, solar orientation, geological flow--that she lay opens on a site. She is an architect who understands the complexities, subtleties and grandeur of individual of the major subjects disentangleed by modernist art in this century: abstract space.