Art in America:
Hedid’s Midwest Coup
Architect Zaha Hedid: Her design for Cincinnati’s Contemporary Arts Center building
The corner site, sided by two large buildings, has a small footprint of 11,000 sq. ft. and occupies a jog in the city grid. Hadid has taken advantage of this anomaly in the urban plan by playing her design to this highly visible corner. For the pedestrian, Hadid opens the building to the street with glazed walls giving a view of the lobby and basement, where installations and performance art is presented. By elevating the ground floor several feet to reveal the basement and the mezzanine cafe leading downstairs, she makes what might seem an elitist institution much more accessible and public. The base of the building is meant to suggest a public plaza extending the street. Also, the horizontal indentations in the facade give Hadid the occasion to capture natural light for all the galleries.
This heart-stopping facade, with convergent lines that accelerate its linear forms, is simply the expression of an interior organization of offices and galleries which promise to work brilliantly.
She has solved the problem of negotiating the eight stories of this vertical museum even better than Wright’s Guggenheim, by bringing a swooping ramp that she calls an “urban carpet” from the lobby up into the building and past the galleries it serves. Gallery floors are not inclined, and people focused on a work won’t be disturbed by the passing traffic. This “urban carpet” was designed as a path of discovery–a road people will want to take because it offers an unfolding experience of the building’s horizontal and vertical caverns. She also invites the city into her building with it. An inclined floor in the lobby leads past the ticket desk to the back party wall, where the highly polished, undulating, ribbon-like ramp winds its episodic way through the heights, past seven levels of galleries housed in the horizontal “tubes” and in the lofty voids between them.
While the drama of the ascent promises to draw visitors up the switchback ramp, the excitement of the experience masks the fact that Hadid has elegantly solved the problem of the urban high-rise museum by creating a promenade that encourages walking rather than taking elevators and escalators. The promenade lends itself to a more intimate visual relationship with the galleries, and it also helps integrate visitors into a passing community within the building, as though on a boulevard. The ramp offers changing interior vistas:
Multiple perceptions and distant views,” Hadid observes, “should create a richer, more perplexing experience, taking your body through a journey of compression, release and reflection.”
The galleries are housed in a cluster of large, horizontal tubes dynamically cantilevered toward the street; the building has a radiant presence, acting as a symbol of the CAC’s history and its progressive stance.
The CAC is one of the first museums anywhere designed by a woman, and, as her first museum and first building in the United States, the design is original rather than a local instance of the established style of an architect who has become a brand name.
One common fallacy in architectural appreciation is that a beautiful building cannot be functional; another is that an ugly one must be practical. Hadid’s CAC design disabuses the casual critic of these bromides.
While her competitors followed the client’s brief, to design malleable loft like spaces easily adapted to successive shows, Hadid offered instead a setting suitable for a changing menu of art projects, proposing a variety of spaces with specific dimensions and character rather than generic white cubes. By varying gallery heights, from 14 to 28 feet, Hadid has created a catalogue of spaces. The top-floor galleries are the most open and visually porous, maximizing the penetration of natural overhead light into the building. To further differentiate galleries, the CAC’s floors, ceilings and walls employ a range of materials. Floors, for example, are made of colored concrete or wood. Some galleries seem raw, and others finished. Though she says she loves painting, Hadid has created galleries that are meant to be spatially provocative rather than conventional.
Hadid’s cleverness uses conventional forms, structure and materials, but in great variety. Simple systems used inventively foster the illusion of complexity.
Categories: 2008, assignments, places
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