Hadid She Ever!

I only knew a little about Zaha Hadid before I checked out her solo show at the Guggenheim the other day -- born in Baghdad, first woman to win the Pritzker Prize in 2004, not a lot that's been built, etc. -- so I was unprepared for what I saw.

Basically, what I saw was genius. People toss around 'genius' all the time when they just mean that someone is 'highly skilled', 'very intelligent' or even 'not entirely incompetent', and I'm guilty of this, too. But Zaha Hadid is an old school, card-carrying genius. Looking at her show, it struck me that it's true of her in the way it's true of Everest that it's a mountain.

I can see that you're skeptical, so let me try to explain myself.

About half of the show consisted of her paintings, which she doesn't really see as stand-alone works as much as a crucial part of the design process. They're somewhere between design plans and conceptual sketches, although they're way too mind-blowing too work off of and too beautiful to be just sketches.

If you look at this example of a study she did for a new building on Trafalgar Square in London, you'll have a hard time figuring out what's going on.

What you eventually realize is that she's imagined the space from multiple angles and at different times of the day and night, and incorporated all this information into one image. You'd basically have to be a cubist space alien or have a PhD in topology for this to make any sort of sense to you, but it seems to be almost intuitive to her, which I just can't imagine.

But even though they're incredibly complex, almost like theoretical physics, they're also incredibly beautiful. I don't even remember what this one was (and I sure as hell can't tell by looking at it), but it sure is pretty.

Near the top of the Goog they have some really gorgeous models that could be sculpture, and then finally a wall of photographs of her finished work, like the Contemporary Arts Center in Cinncinatti. You can check out some photos on their website, but I wanted to call attention to one detail. She wanted the lobby of the museum to act as a sort of public square, so she has the entrance set back underneath the second floor, pulling you in from the outside. She enhances this effect by continuing the sidewalk into the lobby in what she calles a sort of 'urban carpet' effect. But the real kicker is that the sidewalk just flows across the lobby and then becomes the back wall of the museum, as you can see in the photo below.

Maybe this doesn't seem as awesome to you as it does to me, but it just seems to be even more evidence that she just doesn't have any boundaries in her mind when it comes to thinking about space. I think that she builds a structure in her head, then turns it around, torques it, twists it, moves it through space and time, looking for ways to make it work better or be more interesting, or finding problems with it that you couldn't see otherwise.

I'm a smart guy, and I like to tell myself that there's no subject that I couldn't understand if I studied it for a while, even if I couldn't become an expert. And I think I could become an architect if I wanted to. But what Hadid does just seems like something that my brain wasn't built to do. Maybe that quality, not of being better than others, but of having an ability that nobody else has, is the real meaning of genius.