Hadid was born in Baghdad, Iraq, on 31 October 1950 to an upper-class

family of Sunni Muslim Arabs. Her father, Muhammad al-Hajj Husayn

Hadid, was a wealthy industrialist from Mosul, Iraq. He was a founder of
the left-liberal al-Ahali group in Iraq in 1932, which was a significant
political organization in the 1930s and 1940s. He later was vice chairman
of the National Democratic Party in Iraq from 1946 to 1960, and served as
minister of finance for the government of General Abd al-Karim Qasim
after he and fellow army officers overthrew the monarch in July
1958. Zaha Hadid's mother, Wajiha al-Sabunji, also hailed from a wealthy
Mosul family.

Yet Hadid did grow out of a very specific time and place: the Arab world of the
1950s and 1960s. Born into a time of immense optimism and progress, Hadid
lived through the last years of Iraq’s monarchy and the beginning of what felt
at the time like a new era.
“When I was growing up in Iraq, there was an unbroken belief in progress and
a great sense of optimism. It was a moment of nation building,” she told an
interviewer in 2012.
The republics of the Arab world were teeming with new ideas and Hadid’s
father, like many upper class Arabs of his time, threw himself into politics,
helping to found a liberal political party. It was a time of immense political
experimentation, not all of it positive: the Hadids lost some of their wealth due
to nationalisation.

The ease with which different faiths interacted at that time has been much
remarked upon, but even gender lines were drawn differently.

Zaha hadid on kazimir Malevich

Part 1
One is seeing it from a plan view, and one is seeing it from aerial view.
The actual tectonic is also fragmented or broken, and it’s also orbiting.
I was very fascinated by abstraction and how it really could lead to abstracting
plans and moving away from certain dogmas and what architecture is. That
project freed me from this rules.

He started as a Cubist just before the Russian Revolution. But soon began to
advocate an art that would place pure emotionalism ahead of figurative
painting. It was an aesthetic philosophy that perfectly suited the young
revolutionary spirit of the day.

It’s interesting as when the artist is still doing his paintings, it coincides with
world war I, it seems that the artist was the first to really push forward to
express this desire for something new, for building a new world. Commented [C1]: Malevich’s ideology is portrayed in her
works

In 1915 Malevich painted a black square on a white background. Presented

that year in Petrograd at the ‘Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings 0.10’ it
changed the course of art for ever.
It sounds:
‘My black square is a bare and frameless icon for our time. Arise comrades
and free yourselves from the tyranny of objects.’ Kazimir Malevich, 1916

Malevich said we need to question what is painting and what is art. And I think
that is a huge inspiration for an architect like Zaha Hadid, who for seems to
me, is to me, with every project again to us to question about the fundamental
parameters, for example, how does a building function, how does it relate to
its environment

I only respond to Malevich work through how I saw a tragedy and to

architecture, Im not obviously an art historian or a specialist in suprematism or
any Russian work, but I think it was that way it impacted after me on
architecture, and other art work.

I do like a lot of the one I’ve seen in Russia many years ago which has all the
cracks of all the layers, and this happened to many abstract artists when they
decide as they painted, what their painting is. You see the cracks of other
colors underneath, which is white, which is red and that’s what I found really
very exciting, that they painted as they thought about these things.
Commented [C2]: Unlike Malevich, she planned, with her
architectural knowledge, upon how it might have been built
probably. However, it may not be otherwise.

At those times, it was saying you know that Malevich is not a great painted,
because this stuff is not well painted, but that’s not the point, it’s not like a kind
of traditional painting where it has to be perfection of painting technique.

“Suprematism is the beginning of a new culture.. Our world of art has become
new non-objective, pure. Everything has disappeared.” Kazimir Malevich,
1915

Suprematism, for Malevich, was a very important step, broadly speaking, it

involved using geometry in painting, mostly oil on canvas, carefully painted up
to the edges of geometrical forms, interesting, he chose to show the individual
paintings in a way that mirrored the arrangements of the colors and shapes
was in the individual paintings, so they were scattered all over the wall, so
there was an incredible sense of movement and dynamism.

I think, in Russia, there were more dense and there were more pieces, there
was an inconsistent randomness, they were not displaced as curators show
things now, where they’re evenly space, but they were shown all together
almost haphazardly and I think definitely that’s very intentional.
I like the whole composition because it implies also that these are a part of a
kind of universe and they work together and when you zoom in, you will see
certain clusters together, like some kind of galaxy or whatever, I particularly
like the one up there, not just the black square, but the one next to it, I like this
one the red square and like the black cross, that also floating red fragments or
pieces, as if there are something moving, also the scale could be very
different, it could be on a massive urban scale, or it could be very small..

What I think it taught me is composition, it looks very fragmented and very Commented [C3]: She believed in fragmentation and all
that, but felt that there should be an equilibrium like
chaotic, but there was always a kind of equilibrium to the composition. I felt Malevich did.
that all these things I discovered was through abstraction, because I can
understood that I can read abstract drawings but it was the first time I realize
in actually how my mind worked and how I can resolve a problem because
before that like most students, I as well, like staring at your board for days to
have an idea, I realize you have to really organize your thinking.

Like many of his fellow countrymen, Malevich was fascinated with the freedom
associated with flight and space.

“We can only be aware of space if we break away from the earth, if the
fulcrum disappears.” – Kazimir Malevich, 1928

He’d become increasingly interested in outer space and rockets, like the ideas
of rockets trip to the moon, some of these things come from issue wells and
javert who were read in Russia, but the ideas was catching on and for
example, Tsiolvosky, was the first of the great rocket theorist, he became
popular and he read stories about revolution in space and the idea that
mankind was born to live in space, so this is a little mystical, but he was in the
air at the time.

He was very interested in the idea of leaving earth, about reality behind, not
being confined by the laws of logic, sometimes he would rotate an individual
painting sideways, or even 180 degrees, but sometimes he could even
imagine that he could put it up on the ceiling or down on the ground, and they
would take on a different notion of either these shapes rising into infinity or
very quickly when you put them on the ground you could see quite easily turn
them into an architectural plan or architectural drawing.

They are almost like a floating world, but in this from kind of galaxy of worlds. I
mean they are kind of interesting, they are not static, they are usually
equilibrium in this motion, and movement, and I find that really very exciting.

And one thing which has been fascinating for me for the past 30 years, is to
how through a structure, and very ingenious kind of engineering, you can
make building almost like floating about.
The third and final era of Suprematist painting was Malevich’s white period.
Here he pushed the limits of art and painting, stripping away all colour.

“I conquered the living of the coloured sky and tore it off, put colour into the
the resulting bag and tied a knot, fly! A white, free, endless – infinity – is
before you!” – Kazimir Malevich, 1919

When Malevich explains the theory of color, he talked about white, the white Commented [C4]: Some of her buildings are white
background, as symbolizing infinity, and in the early stages of Suprematism,
the color rests on top of white, interestingly, in 1916, it gets caught up to ours,
and in 1917, there’s a mocktail of revolution, after when he returns, to making
abstract paintings, white becomes far more dominant, and I think there’s a
sense, that slowly with the shapes disappear, and with the shapes disappears Commented [C5]: Some of her buildings suggest the
illusion of spaces, in which it might feel that a space is real,
a whole notion of art making as we had known till then. even though then the trajectory of the motion of space
might have been predicted correctly otherwise

What I like about it is that it has one very hard edge, it has a geometric form,
but I call it rushes to the edge, so it goes almost to infinity, the space, beyond
on the right, you don’t know where it’s going, it could go at infinite space, so
the idea of this given dation is also very interesting.
Commented [C6]: This might suggest her later parametric
forms in which it would look like it’s moving so fast, that it’s
moving to infinity

Part 2

It’s very difficult to paint white on white, and it’s almost now you see it and
now you don’t, and so these compositions, are very interesting, because they
are very faint but when you come closer you can see more clearly what they
are.

“Malevich was a grand messianic figure who believed that art was a religion.”

I think there was a fascination with obviously the cross, but there are at the
bottom of the cross, there are other color suprematist, there are lines but this
could be seem in many different scales, I mean it could be the scale of a very
large globe, or it could be a scale or kind of moving spaceship or moving
object in space or it could be seen as a domestic scale where the lines are a
wall or a desk or a chair, so you can actually domesticate these compositions. Commented [C7]: This could make us understand how
she reads Malevich’s paintings and that it could be possible
to reimagine how it could be three dimensional products in
many ways…
One result of Zaha Hadid’s interest in Malevich was her decision to employ
painting early on in her career as a design tool.
Studying Malevich allowed here to develop abstraction as an investigative
principle for her architecture.

Architects who are also painters are unusual breeds, release paintings that
they really want to see, Le corbusiers does it, he spent his mornings painting,
his afternoons designing buildings, and zaha hadid did start in losing herself in
drawing and painting and these were not representations of buildings they
were in some ways the design, you can see the power of them to suggest
free-floating space, jagged forms, the excitement of buildings to lose the
sense of gravity.

I think it’s particularly interesting in her case because most people would
probably associate her architecture vision was computer design. In each
building it has always been adamant on how about the importance of drawing
and painting, to really develop an idea through design development.

If you go and look at something like the Olympic pool which is the largest thing
she’s done in London, it has that painterly quality, there’s no sense of
structure, there’s an awful lot of steel holding up that roof, you don’t see it, she
denies it, she’s the opposite of a high tech architect. She was magic with
space.

In the 1920s Malevich and his followers also moved from painting to
architecture.

“Down with cupolas and heavenly vaults… Let wedges cut into the bosom of
space.” Kazimir Malevich, 1918
These actual drawings are very beautiful pencil drawings. They are very
simple, it explores a three dimensionality because there was a connection
between some of these works and some of the paintings and kind of the
different layers, so it moves from two-dimensional to three dimensional work
and these are applications, also indications of his interest in architecture and
that’s why I find them fascinating.

And I think this one is particularly another I shows that many different
compositions, but it also shows plan, aerial view, section, innovation
altogether.

When Malevich began to translate Suprematism into three dimensions he

made architectural models from plaster.

He called them architectons.

They’re not really modelled for concrete buildings, they don’t have any
practical purpose, so they don’t think about doorways, windows, routes of
access, all the things that an architect would have to think about. It’s a dream
world, it’s a notion of pushing forward into an unknown terrain and developing
an architectural utopia.

They have ambition through him and his students to insert suprematism into
architecture. I mean if you tell him that it should be built, but I think they had
not yet discovered on how to build them. There were always ambitions in
Europe and Germany and everywhere and in Russia to build a new world so it
meant to kind of strip the old world from their old traditions and habits and built
a new world which deals with the new situation and I just think it’s a shame
that you know modernism or modernity, let’s say, was always aborted by a
change in government or war or whatever and so these revolutions were
always curbed or stopped.

Come the revolution, Suprematism became a design for living. Malevich

produced posters, stages costumes, designs for teapots and cups.
“Factory director: Mr. Malevich, your teapot does not pour well. Malevich: it is
not a teapot but the idea of a teapot!”

Reference for part 1:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yye33DucQvw
Reference for part 2:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lg1b_n9IKUo