Throughout architectural history, pavilions have often served as revolutionary forms that housed not only emblems of the ideological values of the building’s commissioner, but also significant artistic statements that furthered the synthesis of art and architecture. In the early twentieth century, Mies van der Rohe and several other major architects employed the pavilion as a solution to pan-European political reformations through the use of rigorously simplistic geometric forms. Zaha Hadid’s most recent building, the Chanel Pavilion that was recently in Central Park and will soon be in London, Moscow and Paris within the next year, represents the efforts of both Hadid and one of Chanel’s chief designers, Karl Lagerfeld, to embody the virtues of the Chanel quilted purse 2.55 through the use of this symbolically charged building type.
Hadid’s progression as an architect has been quite extraordinary. When she won the Pritzker Prize, an award acknowledging her “talent, vision, and commitment” to the innovation of architectural form, in 2004, her reputation was largely based upon smaller buildings or commissioned projects that never reached fruition. The non-rectilinear world Hadid inhabits defies the pavilion typology van der Rohe standardized in 1925. As a result, she has created an architecture stemming from an emphasis on structure and organic wholeness that has nonetheless deconstructed the aforementioned sweeping forms of modernism to focus on individual parts that playfully interact. A London-based Iraqi, Zaha Hadid continues to innovate the modernist traditions of De Stijl and Russian Constructivism with digital design platforms that have increasingly been the basis of architectural design since the early 1990s. This generation of architects has personified the paradoxical nature of architecture: should one focus on art or function, imagination or practicality, aesthetic unity or social viability?
In this time of global crisis, Hadid’s decision to design the Chanel Pavilion—brimming with art that was also insipidly inspired— points out the failure of Hadid’s architecture. The disjunction between theory and reality signifies, according to the architectural critic Ada Louise Huxtable, Hadid’s inability to find a “a greater conceptual and aesthetic range” with which to present her forms. With many of her buildings, Hadid has come close to transcending the formal shackles of her era but fallen short through her lack of theoretical grounding.
The Pavilion itself, which stood next to Rumsey Playfield by the Fifth Avenue and 69th Street entrance to the Park, does a wonderful job of veiling its function as an ill-timed bourgeois marketing gimmick. The cynicism of using an architectural form that previously embodied the ideology of a state’s reinvention to announce a new line of overpriced, aesthetically conventional handbags is almost overshadowed by the curvilinear beauty of Hadid’s creation. Ms. Hadid’s building provides revelation through its dichotomous treatment of interior and exterior space. Its sleek, white façade stands like a shimmering, futuristic automobile against electric green grass, which in turn contrasts the cavernous, flowing interior space.
Ultimately, the bad art encased in this beautiful object suffuses the viewer with a sort of sickness. Within the context of Frederick Law Olmsted’s democratic vision for Central Park, in which class-consciousness would be eliminated and the worn-down urban dweller would find contentment, this corporate object corrupts and infringes upon the liberty of New Yorkers disinterested in the final gasps of ostentatious wealth. Hadid abandons her typical use of raw materials, and it shows: the building is like a lollipop for the consumer who is sugar-addled to a point of mental decay by their absorption in an increasingly unrealistic world of vapidity. Earlier this month, Hadid was quoted in the New Yorker: “I’m not expecting hedge funders who lost everything to come here, but ordinary people have to have a life.” One must wonder, then, why half the women at the Pavilion either had Chanel or Hermes handbags and, moreover, why Hadid has deluded herself into thinking that this project is worthy of her talents.
“Zaha Hadid Complete Works” (edited by Gordana Fontana-Giusti and Patrik Schimacher) provides several explanations through the display of the architect’s many drawings and paintings. Ms. Hadid’s vision is truly revolutionary, finally releasing architecture from the hegemonic modernist rectilinear plan. The paintings of Bridget Riley, asymmetrical and divided by prisms, as well as the Cubists influenced Hadid just as much as previous architects. Her painted forms reveal this dialogue with the fine arts: her graphics act, as most great architectural illustrations do, to inform one of how a building would look as well as how one should look at a building. When photographs are included in this collection, they are most often close-ups revealing the application of artistic detail to a building’s physical reality. Therefore, the book presents the mindfulness that Hadid’s current project lacks.
The Chanel Pavilion represents the disappointments that come with revolution. Artists and architects have been increasingly forced to work for those willing to commission them rather than for those willing to inspire them. In conjunction with the Pavilion’s opening, Hadid and Karl Lagerfeld gave a talk the Museum of Modern Art. Lagerfeld, the typically hallucinatory patron, claimed Hadid had “liberated us from the ugly Bauhaus that covers the world today.” Indeed, she did, but for the purpose for deifying what the Chanel website claims to be “the multiple facets of this mythical bag.”
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