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

Art in America, July, 1995 by Richard Vine

Zaha Hadid first came to wide public notice in the U.S. when her plan for the Peak, a multilevel sports club designed to sweep diagonally down a hill in Hong Kong, was included in the 1988 "Deconstructivist Architecture" show at MOMA [see A.i.A., Jan. '89]. The "horizontal skyscraper" was never built, but the authoritative boldness of its address to the site, coupled with the energy of its neo-Constructivist forms, marked Hadid (who was 33 when her proposal won its competition in 1983) as an audacious, even 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 objects on view. In both instances, Hadid's self-described "uncompromising commitnent to modernism" and her dynamic sense of spatial manipulation were in full evidence.

The MOMA exhibition also displayed her proclivity for highly stylized drawings and painting that transcend their technical function to become objects of great, if sometimes puzzling, beauty. Indeed, so 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 such 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 New York.

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

Hadid's roofless rhomboidal box - all sleek walls and jutting angles, compact spatial efficiency and of-the-moment materials - created a historical dialogue with the enveloping Beaux-Arts structure. Never did the terminal's high vaulting ceilings, prodigiously generous interior volumes and richly solid trappings of steel, 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 out, tethered by an assurance that the known will always be monumentally there to return to. This paradox enabled the architectural firms of Warren & Wetmore and Reed & Stem 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). But if Grand Central's effect is one of Edwardian dedication to human dignity even amid the hubbub of travel, Hadid's zooming, ever-thrusting structures - particularly as interventions into the station's cavernous pile - evoked the high-tech imperative of radical launchings toward inscrutable ends.

The pavilion was slightly elevated off the station floor (perhaps to give the sense of entering a floating dreamworld of ideal geometry) and open at one end to an entrance ramp (the transitional equivalent of Alice's rabbit hole). Shifted 10 degrees off square, the 10-foot-high interior walls teemed with graphic materials, text panels, reliefs and models. Pedestals in the long central space held nine larger models, and the 34-foot-wide floor was covered by a carpet sporting elongated angular patterns in black, gray, yellow, blue, orange and off-white. Outside the pavilion (two of whose exterior surfaces were dark gray and one a dull rust color), a huge multipaneled painting of the Cardiff Bay Opera House project leaned against a station wall. Oddly, the entire juxtaposition, like the exhibition itself (the first one-person architectural show ever mounted in Grand Central Station), excluded a significant historical and conceptual middle ground: the intervening phase of functionalist modernism. Detatched from any immediate antecedents (as is often the case in situ), Hadid's work looks so new that it must surely be secretly old, so futuristic that (as Herbert Muschamp hinted in the New York Times) it suggests the neo-Baroque.

Born in Baghdad in 1950, Hadid was schooled 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, lectures internationally and occasionally undertakes visiting appointments at Harvard and Columbia.