A Dialogue - Zaha Hahid

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Résumé :
The juxtapositions of Zaha Hadid's architectural models and drawings and Judith Turner's photographs of the architect's buildings in this volume reveal that Hadid and Turner are complicit. There is a clear agreement of sensibilities. Each understands the other. In the first decades of Hadid's career, during which she collided forms and designed in the fall-out, Hadid did not design wholes, but buildings composed of fragments. Like Hadid - but unlike most architectural photographers, trained and paid to document buildings -Turner also does not photograph the whole, and rarely includes the context: her camera sees fragments instead, a collage of parts. Turner's photographs from this early period of Hadid's work are fragmentary views of Hadid's fragmented buildings. Hadid's vision lends itself to Turner's. Hadid does not design with complete geometries in stable configurations, but designs instead with incomplete or distorted geometries that are dynamic and visually unstable. Turner does the same in her photographs, cropping before a form completes itself in a frame that leaves the rest of the form suggested outside the frame. Hadid's work is abstract - a permutation of Modernism's trifecta of point, line and plane. Turner's photography, too, is abstract so that Turner's photographs of Hadid's buildings compound the abstraction, arguably intensifying the three-dimensional abstraction by compressing it into two. Hadid's neutral palette of materials, especially concrete, takes on value in Turner's graphic compositions of black, white and gray, counterintuitively giving neutrality subtle intensity. Hadid structures her designs dynamically with diagonal lines and oblique planes playing with and against each other in threedimensional fields. Likewise Turner works on the diagonal, always positioning herself obliquely to buildings, shooting glancingly rather than frontally: her diagonal position further dynamizes Hadid's already energized diagonals. Often Turner doubles down on the diagonality by cranking the camera's lens off its up-down axis to heighten the architectural dynamism. Turning her photographic angle lofts Hadid's already anti-gravitational architectural system off the ground. Joseph Giovannini heads Giovannini Associates, a design firm based in New York and Los Angeles. He holds a Master in Architecture from Harvard's Graduate School of Design. He has taught at various Universities, among them Columbia University, University of California in Los Angeles, and University of Southern California. A graduate of Yale University, where he did his B.A. in English, Giovannini also holds a Master of Arts degree in French language and literature from the Universit? Paris-Sorbonne. See also: Judith Turner, Seeing Ambiguity. Photographs of Architecture, Edition Axel Menges, 2012.