Architects tend to bring out a more nuanced translation, allowing us to murmur before the first word. This is linked to a sense of what remains always with and yet always outside of language.
Architectural Speech is always accompanied, necessarily, with the unsaid: an unsaid that is not simply nothing of silence but is rather a persistent murmur of the masses that sees it of yet no meaning or understanding.
Against the popular trend in architectural theory, fuelled by readings like Jonathan Meades, From INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine, Summer 2008 on Zaha Hadid. The questions are indirect and the ethics might be understood as an alien encounter, a more stringent alterity and this, in turn, raises crucial questions of how it is Zaha approach the other ethically.
These questions are, in indirect ways, picked up through the article and is concerned with questions of relation and, specifically questions of how to conceptualise the Zaha boundary between the self and the social.
In short I suggest our constriction by the dominant concepts in modern architecture and urban form has forced us into a position where it has become all but impossible to think the relation of self and other without being trapped by seemingly common-sense notions of individuality and the naturalization of separateness that it could be suggesting. There’s a preconceived notion of architecture already formed and an armory of border concepts.
Just imagine our current timeline to be the equivalent of the mud hut era where change was needed and you might understand Zaha’s thinking for the future….and the rest, waiting for something to happen whilst sitting on the fence.
“Zaha doesn’t explain her work”….errrm…and? Zaha Hadid states : "We create transformative cultural, corporate, residential and other spaces that work in synhroncity with their surroundings"….is Jonatahn Meades completely just picking for a reaction?
Although the beginning of Zaha’s career could be described as a paper performance. It’s exactly those paper concern experiences and sessions that made lines slip from paper to reality as a sensation of dedication and nakedness to one self. The world wonders why Zaha don’t explain her work…why would she, she’s already naked. Fragments of her soul is already laying bare in many cities across the world.
I call it nakedness as I’m again referring to the Jonathan Meades article stating “Architecture is the most public of endeavors, yet it is a smugly hermetic world.” Zaha is naked. Why does everybody need her to explain the practice to her performance? Step out of the mud hut timeline, stop being part of the audience. Allow yourself to walk into the fluorescent light, wander in its space, get absorbed by its colours and inevitably encountering a new world different from the usual.
Should Zaha been seen as a commodity. No. She’s like us, wandering through Georgian Streets, grim Noddy town cottages set in a maze of alleys…what you’re not seeing is the neon reflection on the rippling puddles.
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