The project was prepared specifically for the Nicholas Hall of the Winter Palace being one of the museum’s major ceremonial historical interiors. The exhibition prepared by the State Hermitage Museum and Zaha Hadid’s studio (London, UK) features 300 models, drawings, photographs, sculptures and design objects. The visitors will be able to see the experimental designs of the 1980s, the first completed projects that brought success to the architect, and, of course, the works of recent years, including the Guangzhou Opera House in China; the Heydar Aliyev Centre in Baku; the MAXXI - National Museum of the 21st Century Arts in Rome; the London Aquatics Centre; the Signature Towers and many others.
The exhibition outlines the pioneering research that permeates the architect’s career. The Peak Club in Hong Kong (unrealized, 1982-83) represents an early manifestation of her exploration of Kazimir Malevich’s compositional techniques of fragmentation and layering. Further projects include the Rosenthal Centre for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati (completed, 2003), Phaeno Science Centre in Wolfsburg (completed, 2005), BMW Central Building in Leipzig (completed, 2005), MAXXI: Museum of XXI Century Art in Rome (completed, 2010), London Aquatics Centre (completed, 2011), Galaxy SOHO in Beijing (completed, 2012) and the Heydar Aliyev Center in Baku (completed, 2012) continue Hadid’s ongoing research towards a new architecture that addresses the increased complexities and dynamism of our future.
Built on the site of an old Soviet tank factory, the centre in Baku dissolves the conventional differentiation between architecture and city, offering welcoming porosity in place of segregated fortification.
“Hadid championed the unconsummated work of the Suprematists. She reengaged the debate and set out to build their revolution,” explains critic Joseph Giovannini. “The Baku center represents a new era in architecture. If a culture can be extrapolated from the architectural posture represented by the Heydar Aliyev Center, it would be freer and more spirited, and applied with a light touch as well as principled discipline. The center, an embodiment of an enlightened philosophical framework, is poetic, compelling, and charismatic. Its open forms promise to help open Azeri culture by an act of attraction rather than imposition. Hadid has designed and crafted an object lesson and a parable. Azerbaijan commissioned a building, and Hadid met the program. But she also read between the lines and exceeded the brief by delivering a futuristic vision and aspirational ideal. “
As the exhibition explores the architect’s forty-year career, we see that, far beyond simply continuing the unfinished project of Modernism and the unfettered spirit of the Avant-garde, Hadid has transcended these ideas, creating an entirely new spatial paradigm; an architecture of the future.
Currently, Zaha Hadid’s studio is working on a variety of projects around the world, including the new Japan National Stadium for the 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo; the Sleuk Rith Institute in Phnom Penh, Cambodia; the apartment complex on West 28th Street in New York; the Central Bank of Iraq and the Grand Theatre in Rabat, Morocco.
Zaha Hadid at The State Hermitage Museum is organized in cooperation with Zaha Hadid Architects as part of the Hermitage 20/21 project launched in 2007 to collect, exhibit and study the art of the 20th and 21st centuries. The curator of the exhibition is Ksenia Malich, researcher of the Modern Art Department at the State Hermitage Museum. Zaha Hadid and Patrik Schumacher (UK) participated in developing the project concept.
Venue.- Hermitage Museum, Palace Square, 2, Dvortsovaya Square, Санкт-Петербург, Saint Petersburg, Russia [Metro: Admiralteyskaya, Nevsky Prospekt, Gostiny Dvor]
Dates.- 24 June to 27 September 2015.
