What will the new Contemporary Arts Center look like? You can get a hint, but only a hint, by looking at Zaha Hadid's exhibition in the current CAC.
Ms. Hadid's design for the $25 million CAC, proposed for the northwest corner of Sixth and Vine streets, is on the drawing boards, to be unveiled in mid-October. Until then, Zaha Hadid, An Introduction serves as a way to get to know one of the most influential architects working today.
Her designs are studied in architecture schools around the world. Her ideas are debated on the World Wide Web. For an architect who has five completed projects (only two of them free-standing buildings) in 20 years of practice, that's quite an accomplishment. Born in Baghdad in 1950, Ms. Hadid studied at the London Architecture Association for five years starting in 1972 and was awarded its prestigious Diploma Prize in 1977. She started her own firm in London in 1979. She holds visiting professorships at Harvard and Columbia universities. She has done designs for projects, most never realized, in Great Britain, Japan, Holland and Germany.
The exhibition is one of two architectural exhibitions now at the CAC. Like the other, Unbuilt Cincinnati, Ms. Hadid's exhibition is about buildings that were never built. But where Unbuilt Cincinnati is filled with detailed plans and models that are easy to interpret, Ms. Hadid's exhibition is elusive. Many of her paintings and designs are so visionary that it's difficult to imagine them as buildings. Ms. Hadid first captured the attention of the architectural world in 1983 with her award-winning design for the Peak Club, a multilevel sports complex designed for a hill overlooking Hong Kong. A large painting of her concept for the club is part of the CAC exhibition. She conceived the building as a skyscraper turned on its side, breaking apart while spilling down a hillside.
It's a fine painting, but not a rendering of a finished building. It is an "exploded isometric" fantasy of rectangular planes slashing through space, sort of like Marcel Duchamp's famed painting, "Nude Descending a Staircase," hung horizontally. A close look at these floating planes shows that they are floor plans, with desks, cubicles, windows and walls clinging to the floating planes.
Another large painting shows the club in one piece, perched high on a rocky hill above Hong Kong. That image shows us where the building would be, but gives only a vague idea of what it would look like.
The pictures are not intended as illustrations of buildings but as visualizations of the designer's ideas. Even with buildings that have been built, the show focuses on the conception rather than the finished project.
IF YOU GO
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What: Zaha Hadid, An Introduction, Contemporary Arts Center
When: Through Aug. 23. 10 a.m.-6 p.m., Monday-Saturday, noon to 5 p.m. Sunday.
Cost: $3.50, students and seniors $2.
Information: 721-0390.
Web site: http://www.spiral.org.
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The Vitra Fire Station, Weil am Rhein, Germany, is one completed project that has received high praise. But there are no photographs of the building here. You look at the studies and imagine the result.
Opposition in Wales
Ms. Hadid has yet to have a major project completed. Her landmark building could have been the spectacular opera house, designed in 1994 for Cardiff Bay, Wales, but conservative opposition killed the project.
Her opera house design was selected from an international competition sponsored by the British Council, which praised it as "one of the most original designs for a cultural building in recent years," . . . a building that "ingeniously reconciles the need for a high quality, acoustically sophisticated auditorium with exceptional spaces and views for the general public."
But the Cardiff Bay Opera House was to be built with public funds and public money means public input -- and outcry. Associates of the Prince of Wales, a vocal opponent of innovative architecture, labeled the design "absurd architectural arrogance," and that was that. But the model and the drawings of the building show that it would have been an important building.
Her proposal for a new wing for the Victoria and Albert Museum in London shows how the architect fits a contemporary design into a group of traditional buildings.
Making her mark
There is no question that her design for the Contemporary Arts Center will be innovative. It's was a reason cited for her selection from a list of world-class architects.
The CAC also picked her because the center would be her landmark building, the one that people who care about contemporary architecture have to see.
As Unbuilt Cincinnati shows, the Queen City has lost the opportunity to bring world-class architecture to the downtown area before. The CAC project gives the city another chance.
