I once heard a prominent museum director call Zaha Hadid the Lady Gaga of architecture. Her fame as an architect owes much to her image as a flamboyant diva who produces striking, over-the-top buildings—a wild woman who makes wild things. Perhaps this is why, despite being the first woman to win the Pritzker Prize, she has had so little success in the United Kingdom, where her practice was founded, in 1980, and has been based ever since. When the British build modern things, they tend to like them cool and buttoned-up, and Hadid’s buildings are almost explosive in their energy. They look as if they could fly you to the moon.
But it seems that the British may lately have begun to realize that, like Lady Gaga, Hadid has rather more to her than a showy exterior. Toward the end of last year, a large public school that she designed, the Evelyn Grace Academy, opened in south London, and just last month the Riverside Museum, which houses an important collection of historic vehicles, opened in Glasgow, overlooking the River Clyde and what remains of the area’s old shipyards. Neither is quite what you would expect from an architect whose recent works include the exuberant, swooping forms of the Guangzhou Opera House and the MAXXI museum, in Rome. They’re not trophy architecture for trophy places, and are designed with considerable restraint and sensitivity to their surroundings, which in neither case could be described as posh. (The school is in Brixton, one of London’s poorest and most crime-ridden neighborhoods, and the museum is in a bleak part of Glasgow that was decimated by American-style urban renewal.) These two new buildings make you realize that Hadid’s reputation as an architect of extravagance isn’t the whole story, since here her zappy forms are not at all arbitrary, and stylistic verve is beautifully blended with common sense.
For the Riverside Museum, Hadid produced an enormous shed of glass and zinc, which meanders across the land in three large bends, like a giant stylized S. The roof consists of irregular silver waves, as if a sheet of zinc had been bunched up in concertina folds. At each end of the S there are huge glass walls, and the roof’s corrugations terminate in a set of zigzagging gables that look like the jagged line of a stock-market chart. The building is visually striking, and inside it yields a space that is both dramatic and functional—with the capaciousness of a warehouse but also a sense of movement. Because of the S bends of the building, you don’t see the whole thing when you come in. Instead, the building reveals itself to you as you move through it and experience its curves, emphasized by long ribbons of lighting in the ceiling, which follow the twisting corrugations of the roof. The glass walls at either end—one faces a riverfront promenade, the other a parking lot—bring in plenty of daylight, and through the one facing the river you can see a huge nineteenth-century sailing ship permanently anchored next to the museum.
The collection includes everything from locomotives to tricycles, organized neither by type nor by chronology but with an appealing and quirky aesthetic sensibility. It takes a certain wit to set historic cars on shelves that project from a fifty-foot-high wall, or to display bicycles on a circular frame suspended from the ceiling like a floating velodrome. Some of the wit is verbal—why else would you put trams next to prams?—and some of it is visual; one of the largest locomotives ever made is set beside a three-wheeled turquoise car called the Wee Bluey. Hadid’s vibrant interior makes a perfect backdrop to such curatorial shenanigans. Details include jagged bannisters that reproduce the eccentric line of the roof, and the walls are painted not in the white of a typical museum but in a soft, glowing mint green.
There is something sentimental at the heart of any museum whose reason for being is to celebrate the affection we feel for objects that were once part of everyday life, but the Riverside Museum has a boldness that transcends coy nostalgia. This is powerful architecture built to house powerful things. Its easy, flowing quality reminds you that the purpose of this museum is to give these streetcars and fire engines new life in a post-industrial world, in which they are honored rather than used. You begin to understand what Hadid was trying to do when you look across the river to the lone remaining shipyard, where amid the cranes and drydocks stands a huge metal shed with a zigzagging roof, used for framing hulls. She took the shed as a starting point, but any architect with a pair of eyes could have done that. What Hadid saw was that, in echoing the shed, it was possible to arrive at a perfect metaphor for the evolution of an old industrial city like Glasgow. The city has gone from being a place where people labor at making things to a place where people come at their leisure to be entertained; Hadid has taken something hard, tough, and workaday and made it fluid and inviting.
The Evelyn Grace Academy, in Brixton, is not a project that one would immediately associate with Hadid. A middle and upper school for underprivileged kids, it’s the kind of project where budgets are tight and options limited—a world away from such Hadid undertakings as a planned arts center in Abu Dhabi and the flashy tower she’s building for the headquarters of a Marseilles shipping company. But here, too, the results surprise. Maybe Hadid has had a social conscience all along and just never had the opportunity to display it, but the academy is a building that bespeaks a genuine desire to demonstrate that architecture can make difficult lives better.
The school was built through a program in Britain that channels private philanthropy into schools that are technically public but run independently, somewhat like charter schools in the States. Evelyn Grace, a concrete building with lots of glass and sharp, crisp lines that suggest constant motion, manages to combine the severity of the typical modern school building with an almost bracing energy. The floor plan is in the shape of a Z, which avoids long, double-loaded corridors and allows the building to fold around its outdoor athletic fields, making the place feel like a tightly composed village. At one point, the building bridges over a running track. A lot of the people I spoke with at Evelyn Grace, including the students, wish that Hadid had given the interior of the building more color, but it isn’t dull, and it isn’t cold. Hadid didn’t try to reinvent the school, or to twist its requirements to fit into her characteristic shapes. She figured out how to make the forms she favors serve the demands of a school, and followed the specifications she was given for classroom size and organization, the most important of which was to break the academy up into four sub-schools, to insure that the place wouldn’t feel like a large institution. Her architecture isn’t a frilly appliqué to a conventional school. It’s present in the very essence of this sleek building, which sends students several very clear messages, the most obvious of which is that society cares enough about them to create something out of the ordinary for them to spend their days in.
But there is a second message, more subtle but at least as powerful, which is that order doesn’t have to be oppressive—that a building can be rigorous and highly disciplined, and at the same time be a comfortable and familiar place. For students whose previous experience with large modern buildings tends toward unforgiving places like public housing and police stations, this may turn out to be revelatory. Evelyn Grace is the kind of school where students have to wear uniforms, with blazers and ties, and have a motto—“excellence, endeavor and self-discipline”—drilled into them. The principal, Peter Walker, had no interest in a building that would be soft and cuddly; he wanted a school whose architecture would challenge and uplift the students, not patronize them. “It is an amazing building to look at,” Walker said to me. “It is an adult building, but that is partly its strength. We are trying to create a different reality.” ♦
