Submission: July 01, 2016
Registration: July 01, 2016
Language: English
Location: Concept
Prizes: N/A
Type: Open
A HOUSE FOR ZAHA HADID
Maybe she didn’t need a house… inasmuch as the shoemaker does not seem to need shoes…And maybe this is why it might be useful for us to imagine one.
But how to do it…?
Would it be glamorous, like its “beneficiary…?”
Would it be high-fashion…?
Would it be flamboyant…?
Would it be opulent and polished and sleek and graphic…?
How would it be…?!
Or, quite the opposite, would it be modest, almost invisible, or visceral, tormented even, earthy and raw as at one point she wanted her own architecture to be…?!
No doubt though, it would the house of the most famous woman architect in the world.
By all standards she pushed the feminine presence at the frontline of architecture and it would be hard to replace her in the foreseeable future.
That very future she so much admired…
So, would A HOUSE FOR ZAHA HADID be “the house of the future…?”
What is “the future”…? And what if Faulkner was right that there is no “future…?!” That the past never dies, that it actually doesn’t even pass…?!?
And could “the future” exist in the absence of the continually ignored, PRESENT…?
What is the relationship between what a word like “the eternal” still conveys and what a word like “the ephemeral” mean…?
Was Zaha Hadid an optimist…? Was she a pessimist…?
Her good friend Sir Norman Foster said that only an optimist could be an architect… that, in other words, from a position of pessimism it is almost impossible to build.
He was probably right, to an extent, although there is, for example, that admirer of Fernando Pessoa (not exactly the most optimist poet) – we are referring to Alvaro Siza – who built and builds… and there are the cynics, who, under the mask of cynicism hide maybe a deeply rooted pessimism… and then there was Louis Sullivan, who wrote both about Optimism and Pessimism…
Anyway… we do not know if Zaha Hadid was an optimist, or a pessimist.
But we could still envision a house for her, that very house she didn’t envision herself… maybe a house increasingly approaching that level of florality (is there such a word…?) her architecture seemed to tend towards lately…? There were insinuations even of symmetry, somehow, in her later work… hidden, but discernible…
We leave you with question marks… maybe many… and with an open space on which to imagine A HOUSE FOR ZAHA HADID.
We welcome ANY work, ANY size, ANY format. You will need to register before the deadline (the 1st of July, 2016) in order to receive a registration number with which to anonymously identify your work. This tribute to Zaha Hadid is organized by ICARCH Gallery and UAUIM (The University of Architecture and Urbanism “Ion Mincu” in Bucharest, Romania). Besides publishing all the works received on our website, we will also organize a traveling exhibition and we will publish a catalogue with the best projects received. If you have any inquiries, please be kind and write to: contact@icarch.us.
