The Iraqi-born British architect Zaha Hadid has projects underway in several Arab countries, some of them on show at a current exhibition in Paris, writes David Tresilian The career of Iraqi-born British architect Zaha Hadid has taken off in recent years. One of the few women at the top of her profession, and probably the only internationally famous architect of Iraqi extraction, Hadid has a number of acclaimed buildings to her credit, as well as an impressive list of awards. Her buildings include the Guangzhou Opera House in China, opened to widespread praise earlier this year, as well as the Maxxi Museum of 21st-Century Art in Rome. Her Aquatic Centre, intended as a centrepiece for facilities put up to host next year's London Olympics, was shown off to journalists earlier this year. Hadid won the Pritzker Prize, the international architectural profession's most prestigious award, in 2004, and she was awarded the UK Stirling Prize for the Maxxi Museum in Rome. The 2006 retrospective of her work at the Guggenheim Museum in New York was the kind of consecration awarded to few architects, living or dead, though Hadid has built nothing in the city and little in the United States apart from the Rosenthal Centre for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati, praised when it opened in 2003. Hadid has contributed designs for a performing arts centre as part of the Saadiyat Island development in Abu Dhabi, which brings together museums designed by some of the best-known names in contemporary architecture, including the Zayed National Museum designed by Foster and Partners, the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi by Frank Gehry and the Louvre Abu Dhabi by Jean Nouvel. Over the past decade or so, perhaps even the past half decade, she has gone from being an architect who won lots of competitions, but had few built works, to being one of the most recognisable figures on the international architectural scene, and not only because of her strikingly leonine looks and sweep of splendid, mane-like hair. As the current exhibition of work by Zaha Hadid Architects at the Institut du monde arabe in Paris shows, the practice has its own agenda, producing jagged-looking "deconstructivist" buildings that send out a message of high technology and the vertiginous possibilities of computer-aided design. Hardly designed to blend in with existing cityscapes, in which they look as if they have more or less touched down, Hadid's buildings ignore their contexts. Future-looking and futuristic, there is nothing falsely modest about her outsize buildings, their scale and self-importance seeming to demand landmark status. With European budgets stagnant and there being little appetite to embark on Hadid-type projects at a time of widespread retrenchment, the practice has turned to the Gulf and China for commissions, as have many other architectural firms. Hadid's Guangdong Opera was a kind of curtain-raiser for the other works the practice currently has under development, among them designs for a new headquarters for the Central Bank of Iraq in Baghdad and a Nile Tower in Cairo. Designed and installed by the practice in a temporary structure, also designed by Hadid, the present exhibition consists of a selection of the firm's work over the past decade, as well as an account of its research. The latter seems to have been directed by senior partner Patrick Schumacher, believed to be a kind of architectural eminence grise, as much as by Hadid herself. The practice's current research agenda, opening the Paris presentation, focuses on the design of towers. These could be seen as something of a provocation in the exhibition's Paris setting, since the city's roofline has been frozen in time more or less since the 19th-century rule of Napoleon III. Jean Nouvel's Institut du Monde arabe, a 1980s exercise in steel and glass, and the neighbouring campus of the University of Paris VI and VII, inspired by a 1960s model of technocratic education, can look almost timid in comparison to what Hadid has on show. Unlike her designs, however, these buildings had to respect the city's planning laws and tight architectural footprints. According to the catalogue, the Hadid practice's approach to the design of towers is an analytic one, breaking them down into four component parts: structural system (skeleton), fa��ade system (envelope), occupyable surfaces (interior floors) and navigation system (interior circulation, chiefly elevators). Playing with these four components, and liberated from any preconceptions about what a tower should look like or how it should function, the practice has come up with some remarkable designs. According to the catalogue notes, possibly by Schumacher, the idea was to break with the certainties of industrial production and to engage with the latest manufacturing and construction techniques. Towers at present, the notes say, "are still driven by pure quantity. Their volume is generally generated by simple vertical extrusion and their inner space is nothing but the multiplication of identical floor-plates. They are vertical dead-end corridors, usually cut off from the ground by a podium." In place of this dull and limited typology, "it might be time to tackle the tower armed with the new concepts and ambitions of parametricism," defined as "architecture's response to the dynamism and complexity of post-fordist network society." What this seems to mean in practice, among other things, is that the structural system, traditionally relying on a central core, is "distributed" across the tower's facades, or possibly throughout its circulation system. As the notes put it, the tower should not need to rely on a solid core for its stability. Instead, "each system is free to develop its own unique character in accordance with its essential function. The skeleton fills the tower's volume with its structural network. The elevators, staircases and escalators are then allowed to 'fly' through the voids they can find within the skeleton." Not all the catalogue is written like this, and other parts of it seem to be directed at a far less technically literate audience, notably the interview with Hadid. However, while the work on towers sounds and looks exhilarating �ê" from the mostly 19th-century surroundings of central Paris, it is rather like going to a strange new country, or being plunged into a work of science-fiction �ê" visitors to the exhibition may leave with more questions than answers, as well as a few nagging concerns. One aspect of the exhibition that may strike visitors is the absence in it of conventional forms of architectural rendering. Unlike conventional architectural exhibitions, Hadid's does not include the plans, sections, perspectives and detailed drawings that help explain how buildings work and how the spaces in them are utilised. Her buildings, whether built or not, are represented by smooth, sculptural models or brightly lit 3D renderings that give nothing away in terms of their internal functioning. Clients wanting to learn how the buildings they are paying for actually work are unlikely to learn very much from these, and the public does not learn much from them either. According to the catalogue, "one of Hadid's most important fields of experimentation has been her drawings. Her reconsideration of the architectural drawing, through nontraditional floor plans with spatial configurations open to interpretation, has had a major impact on all areas of design and architecture." Yet, even visitors not necessarily hung up on the kind of architectural models that explain how buildings work, or not wanting to see the architect's preliminary sketches, done by a hand wielding a pencil in response to an architectural brief, may nevertheless feel some unease when an exhibition includes none of these traditional forms of explanation. If the exhibition includes drawings by Hadid, then it is certainly possible to miss them. More seriously, what is almost always missing from the exhibition, sacrificed to what looks like an exaggerated emphasis on external forms, is an account of the buildings' internal functioning or the relationship between sculptured exteriors and the interior spaces these contain. A lot of architectural objects are on display, but little is said about how these are intended to function or the architectural briefs they are designed to meet. According to the textbooks, deconstructivist architecture specialises in the breaking of connections between work and context, the undermining of expectations of harmony and unity, and the creation of unfamiliar, fragmented or distorted structures. Its appeal, on show in works by Gehry, Koolhaas and Liebeskind as much as in those by Hadid, lies in its use of generally gigantic and unexpected forms. However, looked at from another angle, there are questions about the carbon footprints, let alone the running costs, of such buildings. How efficiently do they function? What happens if they are unplugged? Hadid's research agenda, aiming for ever-greater levels of technological sophistication, can seem to be divorced from what modern movement architects once thought of as one of the most important aims of architecture, if not its prime aim, which was to provide people with better living and working environments. In many cities today, this translates into a need for more and better housing, especially low-income housing, and measures to ease congestion and the reliance on private transport. It also translates, without wanting to be nostalgic, into the creation of human-scaled urban environments in which city-dwellers can lead less stressful lives in better surroundings. Aspirations of this sort are not really a matter of having more "original experiences," though they should not be reduced to suburban cosiness either. They aren't the same as saying that architecture should aspire to functional, Scandinavian blandness, or that it should pastiche traditional forms. Exhilarating though this exhibition certainly is, one came out wondering how far Hadid's style of architecture meets human and environmental concerns. Zaha Hadid, une architecture, Institut du monde arabe, Paris, until 30 October.
