Venice | Zaha Hadid exhibition at the Palazzo Franchetti

By FEDERICA LUSIARDI - 2017-04-22

From May 27 through November 27 – during the 15th Venice Biennale of Architecture – an exhibition at Palazzo Franchetti pays homage to the 40-year long career of Zaha Hadid.

Organized by the Berengo Foundation, through a wide array of media – including paintings, drawings, scale models, and videos – related to completed, ongoing and unbuilt projects, the exhibition depicts the creative evolution of Zaha Hadid Architects.

Cover image: Zaha Hadid, portrait, photo © Brigitte Lacombe

Zaha Hadid exhibition at the Palazzo Franchetti: installation views. Photos © Luke Hayes

Palazzo Franchetti in Venice, photo © Inexhibit

The paintings on show, all made from 1976 to 1989, are particularly noteworthy: Hadid explained how she found in painting a surprising mode of conceptual research and representation, through which to explore and control the development of forms and volumes, under those concepts of fragmentation and layering so distinctive of ZHA’s projects.

Grand Buildings-Trafalgar Square London, 1985 © Zaha Hadid Architects

One room is exclusively dedicated to three seminal projects: the Vitra Fire Station, built in 1993 in Weil am Rhein is the first completed project by Zaha Hadid Architects; the Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati (2003), for which Zaha Hadid was awarded the Pritzker Prize in 2004, and the MAXXI museum in Rome, completed in 2009, which marked the period in which computer-aided design was introduced in the wide-ranging experimentation of the practice.

Hafenstrasse Hamburg, 1989 © Zaha Hadid Architects

MAXXI Museum Rome, photo © Inexhibit

Taking about computer-aided design, Zaha Hadid said: “The developments that computing has brought to architecture are incredible, enabling an intensification of relationships and greater precision – both internally within the buildings as well as externally with their context. It took me twenty years to convince people to do everything in 3D, with an army of people trying to draw the most difficult perspectives, and now everyone works in 3D on the computer – but they think a plan is a horizontal section, but it’s not. The plan really needs organization via a diagram.”

Zaha Hadid exhibition at the Palazzo Franchetti
Campo Santo Stefano, Venice, Italy
May 27 – November 27, 2016

website: www.fondazioneberengo.org