I've done a lot of projects with Zaha and I recall a visit I made to her studio shortly after they had won the Rome MAXXI project. Their lead office architect was standing at the A0 printer watching drawings of MAXXI as they rolled out. These drawings were huge but had almost nothing on them, just the main curves of the building. The office architect looked at the drawings and said to me rather wistfully: "wouldn't you think there would be more detail on the drawings when we move from 1:200 up to 1:50?"
Hadid's studio was mostly staffed by recent graduates from the AA DRL Masters course that I taught on, and we had brilliant students but usually without any building experience. They just didn't know about this fiddly stuff. And the result? Pure genius. Ignorance is bliss!
Hey Tom. You asked for comment so here goes.
ReplyDeleteI found the detailing on MAXXI pretty disappointing. It looks great in photos (and no doubt in the architectural drawings) but in the flesh the quality of construction in places was pretty horrible - the staircases and banisters in particular.
Up close those beautiful curves are riddled with kinks and irregularities. That these defects are part of the building that you interact with on such an intimate level (eg in running one's hands along the banisters) makes them all the more apparent. For this kind of minimalism to sing it really needs to be executed perfectly.
Of course in many other respects it's a quite beautiful piece of architecture (although no one seems to be able to figure out where the entrance is!).
Yes good point. It's true that Zaha's projects are plagued by poor construction quality. If MAXXI had been built to the same level as, say, Aalto's Finlandia House it would have been great. But Aalto's work was forged in the craft of architecture and Zaha's in the digital universe. And she doesn't like the detailing to be sub consulted out in the way that Herzog and De Meuron have done.
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