Zaha Hadid
Zaha Hadid, Malevich's Tektonik 1976/1977
An evening of discussion between multiple award-winning architect Zaha Hadid and Achim Borchardt-Hume, Head of Exhibitions at Tate Modern and curator of Malevich.
Considering Hadid’s concept of architecture and its relationship to space and the city, this conversation reflects on Malevich’s Architektons, as well as other works of Suprematism, as formative inspiration for her own practice.
The volumetric compositions of Suprematism such as Architektons were utilised to create new possibilities for interior space, while Malevich experimented with these constructions as means for social transformation through radical architectural form. The novelty, purity and originality of these works fostered a new psychology of perception in both art and architecture.
The link between Zaha Hadid and Suprematism has spanned her entire career, beginning with her 1976-77 graduation thesis for the Architectural Association, Malevich’s Tecktonik, which takes a visually deconstructed influence from Malevich and uses it as the starting point for a fourteen-level London hotel concept design. Following this interest, in 1993 Zaha Hadid was asked by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York to create an exhibition design for their encyclopaedic show of the Russian Avant-Garde, The Great Utopia. Hadid continues to demonstrate her relationship to Suprematism, recently designing and curating an exhibition at Galerie Gmurzynska Zurich that juxtaposed her own work with early twentieth-century Russian art pieces.