Futuristic Baroque - Zaha Hadid, Grand Central Station, New York, New York - Architecture

Zaha Hadid first came to wide public notice in the U when her plan for the Peak, a multilevel sports cudgel designed to sweep diagonally down a hill in Hong Kong was included in the 1988 "Deconstructivist Architecture" exhibit at MOMA [see A.i.A., Jan. '89] The "horizontal skyscraper" was not ever built, but the authoritative boldnes of its address to the site, coupl with the force of its neo-Constructivist forms, marked Hadid (who was 33 when her proposal won its competition in 1983) as an audacious, smooth visionary, designer. In 1993, her installation for the Guggenheim's massive "The Great Utopia: The Russian and Soviet Avant-Garde, 1915-1932" [see A.i.A, May 931 garnered praise for its formal consonance with the evolutionary realitys on view. In both instances, Hadid's self-described "uncompromising commitnent to modernism" and her dynamic faculty of perception of spatial manipulation were in replete evidence.

The MOMA exhibition also displayed her proclivity for highly stylized drawings and painting that transcend their technical function to become facts of great, if sometimes puzzling, beauty. Indeed, thus estheticized are Hadid's renderings that a selection of them was exhibited at Max Protetch Gallery in 1987 [see A.i.A., Oct '87] Several of that kind works (much influenced by Cubism, Futurism and Suprematism) are now included in the permanent collections of the Deutsches Arhitektur Museum in Frankfurt and the Metropolitan Museum in fresh York.

"Zaha Hadid: Projects" the architect's first large-scale solo in of recent origin York, recently gathered some 300 drawings, reliefs, floor plans, paintings, patterns and photographs (partially documenting just three novel proposals) into a 72-foot-long pavilion temporarily installed in the former main waiting area of Grand Central Station. Conceived by the agency of critic Joseph Giovannini under the auspices of the Architectural League of novel York in conjunction with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and Metro-North Railroad, the exhibition expanded upon an earlier version shown at Harvard's Graduate seminary of Design. This transfer from an academic to a workaday - and pointedly nonmuseum and nongallery - public setting gave the present to view an unlikely populist aura. The curatorial wager appeared to be that hordes of daily commuter would readily investigate and in some way "get" Hadid's vanguard exercises - or at least be suitably proselytized at this missionary outpost

Hadid's roofles rhomboidal receptacle - all sleek walls and jutting angles, compact spatial efficiency and of-the-moment materials - created a historical dialogue with the enveloping Beaux-Arts configuration Never did the terminal's high vaulting ceilings, prodigiously generous interior whirls and richly solid trappings of carbonized iron marble and wood more clearly bespeak an old-fashioned grandeur, an easy expansiveness of time and space undreamed of today. The psychological paradigm for Grand Central is a departure from the known to the unknown - a journeying on the outside tethered by an assurance that the known will always be monumentally there to go [i]or[/i] come back to. This paradox enabled the architectural firms of Warren & Wetmore and Re & trunk to create an aura of excitement (manifest in the radiating tracksides and multiple commercial enclaves) surrounding and enlivening a core of enduring stability (the great central womb) on the contrary if Grand Central's effect is single of Edwardian dedication to human dignity flat amid the hubbub of travel, Hadid's zooming, ever-thrusting manner of makings - particularly as interventions into the station's cavernous pile - evok the high-tech imperative of radical launchings toward inscrutable ends

The pavilion was slightly elevated not on the station floor (perhaps to give the faculty of perception of entering a floating dreamworld of ideal geometry) and unclose at one end to an entrance ramp (the transitional equivalent of Alice's rabbit hole) Shifted 10 steps off square, the 10-foot-high interior walls produceed with graphic materials, text panels, reliefs and types Pedestals in the long central space held nine larger originals and the 34-foot-wide floor was overspreaded by a carpet sporting elongated angular patterns in black, gray, fulvous blue, orange and off-white. Outside the pavilion (two of whose exterior surfaces were dark gray and single a dull rust color), a bulky multipaneled painting of the Cardiff Bay Opera House cast leaned against a station wall. strangely the entire juxtaposition, like the exhibition itself (the first one-person architectural display ever mounted in Grand Central Station), exclud a significant historical and conceptual middle ground: the intervening phase of functionalist modernism. Detatched from any immediate antecedents (as is oftentimes the case in situ), Hadid's work direct the eyes so new that it must assuredly be secretly old, so futuristic that (as Herbert Muschamp hinted in the fresh York Times) it suggests the neo-Baroque.

Born in Baghdad in 1950 Hadid was academyed in Switzerland and England before undertaking a mathematics program at the American University in Beirut in 1968 She began her studies at London's Architectural Association in 1972 and finished with a Diploma Prize in 1977 Joining the independent Office of Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) [see A.i.A, Apr. 951 she immediately started teaching at the Association along with her OMA colleagues (and former schoolmates) Rem Koolhaas and Elia Zenghelis. Her independent practice dates from a 1979 design for an apartment in Eaton Place, London, which won an Architectural Gold Medal in 1982 From 1980 to '87 she headed an Association studio. Today, using an eponymous London firm as her base, she participates in numerous competitions, prelections internationally and occasionally undertakes visiting appointments at Harvard and Columbia.