BY OWEN FINDSEN
The Cincinnati Enquirer
![[cac]](/editions/1998/11/15/cac_150x167.jpg)
This model of the CAC's new museum will be unveiled Monday.
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Every year, 60,000 people make a pilgrimage to the little town of Weil am Rhein in southwest Germany to look at the Vitra Fire Station. It's one of the few buildings designed by London architect Zaha Hadid.
Every week, some 30,000 people type "Zaha Hadid" on the Internet, and wind up at the Contemporary Arts Center's home page, looking for news on the CAC's proposed new building, designed by Ms. Hadid.
"Imagine 60,000 people coming to Cincinnati just to see our building," mused Charles Desmarais, CAC director.
It will be the first freestanding art museum building constructed in Cincinnati since Cincinnati Art Museum was built in 1881. CAC's current space, over Walgreen's on Fifth Street, was built in 1971. The design, planned for the northwest corner of Sixth and Walnut streets, will be unveiled Monday.
Zaha Hadid
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Buzz about the museum has been building for months.
Preliminary sketches were praised by architecture critics from the New York Times and Los Angeles Times. Articles about it have appeared in Elle and Art News. Vogue has an article in the works.
"Fragmented, dartlike shapes swirling into a vortex, like a new galaxy in formation," wrote Herbert Muschamp in the New York Times. "Interior spaces as pieces of a jigsaw puzzle."
"Hadid is erasing boundaries - between inside and out, between a controlled and private inner world and the chaotic energy of public life," Nicolai Ouroussoff wrote in the Los Angeles Times.
"Will one of the most talented architects alive be able to fit her sci-fi forms into the old-fashioned downtown of a Midwestern burg?" asked Wired magazine.
It is an architectural paradox that the most innovative architects are the ones with the fewest completed projects.
Pioneers, such as Ms. Hadid, often are teaching architects who rarely get to practice. They submit exciting designs that may attract the attention of other architects but intimidate clients.
Risky business
"It is bound to attract a lot of attention for a little while," said John Senhauser, Cincinnati architect and member of the city's Urban Design Review Board. "But her work is capable of a more durable presence. It's more important than simply fashion."
"Zaha is risky business," said Cincinnati architect Michael Schuster, "but you've got to stick your neck out if you want to reach that high level of art. I'm certainly going to be there when they unveil the design."
After it is unveiled here Monday, the design will be introduced in New York on Tuesday and in London next month. The Cincinnati unveiling, at 6 p.m. in the Aronoff Center's 440-seat Jarson-Kaplan Theater, has been sold out since Nov. 5. Mr. Desmarais said reporters from 21 newspapers and magazines are expected at the New York event.
Though the specific look of the building has not been made public, Ms. Hadid has explained the concept in detail. She has shown preliminary drawings to the CAC board and given a series of presentations to the Urban Design Review Board.
Designs for the $27.5 million project show a 65,000-square-foot, six- or seven-story building, with 20,000 square feet of exhibition space, a below-ground level with a cafe and 300-seat theater. It is expected to be completed in 2001.
The facade of the building will be a variation of planes in concrete, metal and glass. The passage from the outside to the inside will be gradual, making the lobby part of what the architect calls the "urban carpet."
The idea is to diminish the boundary between the interior and the street outside by treating the walls as transparent veils.
"If she's able to pull it off, you're going to see into the building, practically to the back wall," said David Niland, professor of architecture at UC and a member of the Urban Design Review Board.
"It would serve as a tremendous magnet to draw people inside the space," said Jay Chatterjee, dean of the University of Cincinnati College of Design, Architecture, Art and Planning.
The floor lines are unconventional, sloping ramps leading up through the building and down to the cafe and theater.
"She has a very unique way of converging space, layering, folding, opening up, causing a continuous progression through the building," Mr. Chatterjee said.
The exterior won't be a square box. There will be projecting and receding cubes and rectangular frames, in transparent, translucent and opaque materials. Mr. Chatterjee describes her designs as "very angular, very severe."
'Very provactive'
Born in Baghdad in 1950, Ms. Hadid studied at the London Architecture Association and was awarded its Diploma Prize in 1977. She started her own firm in London in 1979. She holds visiting professorships at Harvard and Columbia universities. She has designed projects, most never realized, in Great Britain, Japan, Holland and Germany.
"There haven't been many completed projects, but what she's done has been very provocative," Mr. Senhauser said.
Her most famous completed project, the Vitra Fire Station, is part of the corporate campus of the Vitra Furniture Co., which also contains buildings by architects Frank Gehry and Tadao Ando. Designed as a fire station, the building now is an extension of the Vitra Design Museum, housed in Mr. Gehry's building.
The urban setting of the CAC building, with only two of its four sides exposed, offers greater challenges to an architect than an open space, such as the Vitra campus.
"You have a tougher, fractured 10,000-square-foot footprint here," Mr. Desmarais said. "It will be a large floating plane above an open lobby area." Galleries can be closed at night so that the lobby can remain open.
Mr. Chatterjee classifies Ms. Hadid's approach to design "deconstructivist." It's a hot trend in architecture - and it's hot here. Two prime examples can be seen on UC's campus: Peter Eisenman's pastel-paneled Aronoff Center for Design & Art and Frank Gehry's ballooning brick Vontz Center for Molecular Studies, which is being built now on Martin Luther King Drive at the UC Medical Center.
"Cincinnati is the only city in the world where you will be able to see work by all three," Mr. Chatterjee said.
"This is not a typical building, not a trivial piece," Mr. Senhauser said. "It will require extraordinary attention to craft and detail, by the designer and by the constructor, to demonstrate the lyrical quality of her work."
Mr. Desmarais said that KZF, the Cincinnati architectural firm on the project, and Turner Construction Co., the contractor selected to build it, have visited the Vitra Fire House to better understand the level of quality required.
"One of the reasons we selected Ms. Hadid, one of the things she is noted for, is making elegant use of ordinary materials," Mr. Desmarais said. "There are no expensive materials in the Vitra Fire House, just poured concrete - but the way she treats it makes it look special."
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