Zaha Hadid and Suprematism
Zaha Hadid's career began in the 1970s; in an era of socio-political changes that let to a sense of disillusion with established norms and cultural practices. In arts as well as architecture, there has been a shift in consciousness, and an emerging desire to break with the old and to create something new (Woods, 2009). Hadid, taught by notorious figures such as Bernard Tschumi or Rem Koolhaas, who have attempted to challenge existing architectural principles by modernist strategies, was inevitably influenced by tendencies to re-imagine social and aesthetic landscapes (Design Museum, 2014). For Hadid, this period corresponds to attitudes of the early twentieth century, when modernist artists radically re-contextualised …show more content…
His new Suprematist philosophy argued for a non-objective character of art, achieved through aesthetic reductionism to abstract geometrical forms and colours (Cumming, 2014; Hadid, 2014). Unlike static figurative artworks, Malevich wanted to capture pure feelings and spiritual sensations, disclosed within Suprematist paintings, and reflective of dynamic modern lives. Fascinated by Malevich's approach, Zaha Hadid has translated Suprematist methodologies and techniques into her own architectural designs. Her early work thus uses painting as a research method for developing proposals. As Didero (2012) puts it, this line of work functions as 'a form of reverse archaeology' (p.n.g.), where Suprematism provides visual and theoretical means of imagining spaces made of forms and contents that simultaneously capture the modern condition and the architect's personal response to it. Hence, her drawings use sharp geometries, floating objects and abstract imagery, imagining three-dimensional architecture that derives from two-dimensional Suprematist works. As a result, Schumacher (2011) suggests that this method can create a 'space of becoming' (p.407), creating dynamic forces within fragmented urban