Alexander Lavrentiev – Zaha Hadid and the Russian Avant Garde

Zaha Hadid, drawing in the guest book of the Museum
of Applied Arts (MAK), Vienna
Depending on the type of buildings, some
compositional characteristics could be
dominating. Some works by Zaha Hadid—
for instance the project of the Innovation
Tower in Hong Kong or the library in
Seville—can be regarded as the development
of some of Ladovsky’s tasks, where
extreme lightness or heaviness are
compositionally stressed by means of
architectural forms. The whole system of
Ladovsky’s exercises was based on the
Cubist approach to form. Forms are
divided by sections into pieces which move
and freeze at some moment, giving birth
to an architectural image. What we see in
works by Zaha Hadid is, in her own words,
a “controlled explosion.”
What is space? It is an interesting and
ever-changing subject. For instance,
K.O. Vytuleva, a young art historian from
Moscow, has discovered the phenomenon
of “blurred silhouettes, uncertain and
ephemeral images” 5 in contemporary architecture. She found the echo
of this illusionism in the echo of the legacy of the “theory of a cloud”—
a cross-disciplinary theoretical concept of the nineteenth and twentieth
century. She did an analysis of Zaha Hadid’s building and found the
repeating motif of the cloud-like form. In general, this idea is very close
to the paintings from Malevich’s series White on White, as well as
Rodchenko’s Dissolution of the Surface. In both cases, the paintings by
Malevich and Rodchenko stress the mutual influence of space and form
and the miraculous things that happen at their flexible border.
According to Ladovsky, the main material of architecture is space. Yet
it is not just emptiness. Architectural space is a gap articulated by means
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