The Russian Revolutionary: Zaha Hadid on Kazimir Malevich Secret Knowledge

And I felt that all these things I discovered

were through abstraction.

I could read the abstract drawing,

but for the first time I realised how my mind worked.

I was so obsessed with this work when I was studying

and in my early career that I went over it over and over again.

I think one of the curious parallels between Malevich

and Zaha Hadid is this desire from very early on to want to be

truly modern.

To question every convention,

every premise.

It allowed her to see space differently.

It made her think of weightlessness in architecture

and that's really the way she has developed ever since.

What I think is extraordinary is to be able

to have energy from a very simple thing like a black square.

I mean, at the time this came out of nowhere, almost.

She came to the Architecture Association,

and some of the people who taught her there

at the time think that she was

in some ways looking for something when she arrived.

And then Suprematism suddenly hit her like an express train.

And when you are in a bleak economic period, which is what the '70s were,

when you are being assaulted on all sides by people who

think your work is somehow wrong and misguided, that sense of going

back to anything being possible was very liberating.

The painting behind is called

The Malevich Tektonik, which was the name of the project

we did in my fourth year.

The Tektonik is the one in the middle,

with shadows around it,

the pieces which are around the painting.

So one is seeing it from a planned view

and one is seeing it from an aerial view.

Of course it was very influenced by all the paintings by Malevich,

by the Suprematists and by other abstract pieces,

the whole idea of block colour and also of fragmentation.

The actual Tektonik is also fragmented or broken,

so it is in the process of orbiting

before it lands on Hungerford Bridge.

I was very fascinated by abstraction

and how it could really lead to abstracting plans,

moving away from certain dogmas about what architecture is.

And that project really liberated me,

freed me from all these rules.

She is trying to think through

the possibilities of what might happen if there WAS a building

that Malevich had made... completely speculative architecture.

And yet in her mind it was always real.

It was going to get built sooner or later.

What was very interesting in terms of

Zaha Hadid looking at Malevich's

architectons, at the moment that she did. At that stage, really,

East and West were fully divided

and this was a deep ideological division.

So for a very young architect to look back

at a Russian revoluionary artist

and say, "This is my elected affinity,

"this is how I see my work," was a very radical gesture.

What is very easy to forget when you see these

works today in a gallery

is the context of the time in which they were made.

As Malevich began to push towards abstraction, this coincides

with the outbreak of the First World War.

It's very interesting then that the artists

are the ones who are the first really to push forward,

who express their desire for something new,

for building a new world.

The Black Square is radical only because

the time it came out it was such an amazing thing.

Suprematism was to achieve total simplicity

and also the whole movement was very mystical.

That's why it comes with such amazing power, the square.

When it was done at the time, the move from figurative art

and Cubism to this abstraction was an amazing leap.

And to achieve that was really incredible.

He called it The End and the Beginning.

What he is doing is saying

the old regime is collapsing,

and we need to find a means of

understanding the world differently.

Malevich set out to really question what is painting

and what is art.

I think that holds huge inspiration for an architect

like Zaha Hadid, who, it also seems to me, with every project again

sets out to question the fundamental parameters. How does a building

function, how does it need to relate to its environment?

I only respond to the Malevich work through how I saw it

translated into architecture.

I am obviously not an art historian, nor a specialist in Suprematism

or any of the Russian work,

but I think it was the way it impacted for me

on architecture, on other artwork.

I do like a lot the one I've seen in Russia many years ago which

has all the cracks of all the layers of the painting.

And this actually happened with many abstract artists

when they decided as they painted on what their painting is.

So you see the cracks of other colours underneath, which was

which was white with red.

And that is really what I find very exciting, that they

painted as they thought about these things.

I remember people at the time saying,

"Malevich is not a great painter

"because his stuff is not well painted."

But that was not the point.

It is not like a traditional painting where it has to be

perfection of painting technique.

In the top corner of the room

he showed the Black Square.

Now, that was a very particular choice.

That spot usually in a traditional

Russian household was reserved for an icon,

for a religious painting

which was seen not as a painting, not as an art object,

but as an object of devotion.

And even if Malevich himself didn't outrightly intend it as such, it was

immediately read as that by the critics.

So they immediately commented on that and said,

"This is blasphemy, this is outrageous."

Suprematism, for Malevich, was a very important step.

Broadly speaking, it involved using geometry in painting,

mostly oil on canvas,

carefully painted up to the edges in geometric forms.

Interesting he chose to show the individual paintings

in a way that mirrored

the arrangements of the colours and shapes

within the individual painting,

so they were scattered all over the walls.

There was am incredible sense of movement and dynamism.

I think he intended also to show it as a whole world.

Obviously in that show in Russia

it was much more dense, there were more pieces.

There was a consistent randomness.

They were not displaced as curators show things now, evenly spaced,

but they were shown all together, almost haphazardly, and I think

that was definitely very intentional.

I like the whole composition

because it implies also that these are part of a universe.

They work together, and when you zoom in,

you see certain clusters together like a galaxy or whatever.

I particularly like the one up there -

not just The Black Square but the one next to it.

I like this one, The Red Square, I like The Black Cross.

Those also floating red fragments or pieces as if something is moving.

Also the scale could be very different.

It could be on a massive urban scale

or it could be very small.

What I think it taught me is composition.

It looks very fragmented and very chaotic,

but there was always a kind of equilibrium to the composition.

And I felt that all these things I discovered

were through abstraction,

because I understood...like, I could read the abstract drawing,

but for the first time I realised actually

how my mind worked and how I can resolve a problem.

Because before that, like most students, and I would do the same,

would stare at a board for days to have an idea.

And I realised you really have to organise your thinking.

He had become increasingly interested in outer space.

In rockets, or the idea of rockets, a trip to the moon.

Some of these things coming from HG Wells and Jules Verne,

who were read in Russia.

But the idea was catching on.

A man called Tsiolkovsky, for example,

was the first of the great rocket theorists.

He became very popular,

and he wrote stories about revolution in space

and the idea that mankind was born to live in space.

It was all a bit mystical, but he was in the air at the time.

He was very interested in the idea of

leaving earthbound reality behind,

of not being confined by the laws of logic.

Sometimes he would rotate an individual painting sideways

or even 180 degrees.

But sometimes, I think, he could even

imagine that you could put them up on the ceiling or down on the ground

and they would take on a different notion of either of these shapes

rising into infinity.

Or very quickly when you put them on the ground,

you could see quite easily how you could turn them

into an architectural plan or an architectural drawing.

They are almost like floating worlds.

But in this case they form kind of galaxies or worlds.

That is why the compositions are interesting,

because they are not static.

They reach an equilibrium through this motion and movement.

And I find that really very exciting.

And one thing which has been fascinating for me

for the last 30 years

is how through a structure, and very ingenious kind of engineering,

you can make buildings almost like floating about.

When Malevich explained his theory of colour,

he talked about white, the white background as symbolising infinity.

And in the early stages of Suprematism,

the colour rests atop of white.

Interestingly, in 1916 he gets called up to arms.

In 1917 there is the October Revolution.

After that, when he returns to making abstract paintings,

white becomes far more dominant.

I think there is a sense that slowly the shapes disappear,

and with the shapes disappears the whole notion of

art-making as we had known it until then.

What I like about it is that it has one very hard edge

as a geometrical form, but it whooshes to the edge.

So it goes almost to infinity.

The space beyond on the right, you don't know where it's going,

it could go at infinite space.

So the idea of this gradation is also very interesting.

It's not a pure form, but a gradated form.

I find that very exciting.

It's very difficult to paint white on white.

And it's almost now you see it, now you don't.

So these compositions are very interesting

because they are very faint.

But when you come closer you can see more clearly what they are.

Of the two bits of film I've seen of him,

he's pushing people out of the way and saying,

"Look, I'm here, I've arrived. "Follow me."

He did say on one occasion,

"First there was the Old Testament, then the New Testament,

"and here's the testament of Suprematism."

Personally, I think

he was very interested in mythical ideas, a certain degree of mysticism.

I'm sure that he was aware that the cross is one of those forms,

geometric shapes, that is highly ambiguous.

So even if you said it's nothing more

than a simple bold geometric shape, it is impossible to read it as such

because the cultural determinism is too strong.

When we see a cross, we will have certain associations.

I think there was a fascination with the cross,

but also at the bottom of the cross there are other Suprematist lines.

But this could be seen in many different scales.

It could be the scale of a very large globe.

It could be a scale of a moving spaceship

or a moving object in space.

Or it could be seen as a domestic scale where

the lines are a wall or a desk or a chair.

So you can actually domesticate these compositions.

Architects who also paint are an unusual breed.

Or at least paint things that you might actually want to see.

Le Corbusier did it. He spent his mornings painting,

his afternoons designing buildings.

And Zaha's career did start in losing herself in drawing

and paint, and these were not representations of buildings,

they WERE in some ways the designs.

You can see the power of them to suggest free-floating space,

jagged forms,

the excitement of buildings that lose the sense of gravity.

I think it is particularly interesting in her case,

because most people would probably associate her architectural

vision with computer design, and yet she has always been very adamant

about the importance of drawing and the importance of painting.

So, manual design development to really develop an idea.

Zaha won it with an absolutely extraordinary

series of giant paintings that showed a hilltop

turned into a building as if

a geological survey had been carried out on

that hill and turned into a painting which was somehow also a building.

This drawing, obviously, is one of

the most important drawings we've done -

the slabs, which shows the whole story of the Hong Kong Bay.

This was another of these drawings

which is like a confetti drawing where

all the elements of the interiors of The Peak is floating...

These are on the rooftops of...these.

They are quite abstract, the rooftops,

but what you see is the interiors

of all the slabs here.

How the slabs, which are very abstract,

fly over the landscape and then they begin to engage with

the landscape, and then they compose what I call Suprematist geology.

We try to draw architecture in a different kind of way.

-The drawings which are scientific to build from are still there.

-Mm-hm.

But I think the drawings are so important

that they have a different value to them.

But looking at them as an object in itself,

a lot of people will say this is a very artistic drawing

and something that they would consider art.

-Yeah, well...

-But you don't like that term?

I don't care. It doesn't bother me.

But I think they were done to explore architecture.

Of course they do have an artistic quality,

but that is not the intention.

That's me saying that as a gallerist.

-They certainly do.

-That's not the intention,

the intention is to make a perfectly stunning drawing which gives

ideas or stories about the project we are showing.

If you go and look at something like the Olympic Pool,

which is the largest thing she's done in London,

it has that painterly quality.

There's no sense of structure.

There's an awful lot of steel holding up that roof,

but you don't see it, she denies it.

She's the opposite of a hi-tech architect,

she does magic with space.

You wouldn't mistake her work for Malevich

but there is this dynamism.

She has a kind of calligraphic flow which is not his.

She's quite a different person, different architect.

But it's as if he sprang this release.

These architectural drawings are very beautiful

pencil drawings, they're very simple.

It explores the three-dimensionality

because here is a connection between some of these works

and some of the paintings,

and the different layers or the pieces

which are next to each other, against a spine.

So it moves from two-dimensional work to three-dimensional work,

and these are also indications of his interest in architecture.

And that is why I find them fascinating.

I think this one is particularly nice,

it shows many different compositions.

But it also shows plan, aerial view, section, elevation, all together.

They're not really models for concrete buildings.

They don't have any practical purpose,

so they don't think about doorways, windows,

routes of access, all the things an architect would have to think about.

It's a dream world, it's a notion really of pushing forward

into an unknown terrain and developing an architectural utopia.

He called them things like

Dwelling for Ordinary Earthlings or..

-HE LAUGHS

-..House in Space

and this kind of thing,

so they're a provocation, but they're full of ideas

and they appear weightless in many ways.

There's a famous photomontage

of a view of the New York skyscrapers,

through which one of these architectons

goes flying through,

as if to say, "They're very clever,

"these Americans, but these are going to fly."

There obviously was an ambition through him and his students

to insert Suprematism into architecture.

I mean, he intended for them to be built,

but I think they had not yet maybe discovered how to build them.

There were always ambitions

in Europe and Germany and everywhere, and in Russia,

to build a new world,

so it meant to kind of strip the old world

from their old traditions and habits, and build

a new world which deals with the new situation.

And I just think that it is a shame

that Modernism, or modernity, let's say, was always aborted by either

a changing government or a war, or whatever, and so

these revolutions were always curbed or stopped.

When Malevich came to Vibesk to work there as a teacher and worked

with his students, they very rapidly thought about all kinds of ideas.

How you could translate Suprematism

into a new language for a new social order.

So on the one hand they set out to design new objects,

and in the exhibition we have a cup which is only one half of a cup.

Or we've got a teapot which looks like an architecton

translated into a utilitarian object.

What is interesting about these periods is that they

had an idea about a whole universe.

Everything designed. And I think that is really fascinating.

I think our period is very different.

I like the idea of juxtaposing old things next to

new things of different periods. I think it works very well.

It's not a religious belief for me

that everything should be designed by me.

I can design everything

because I think it is nice that you can do that.

But I don't think everything should be...

In my house, most of the stuff is by myself, by us, by the office.

But I think then it was a whole...the whole world, you know?

It is very Tektonik, that's what is interesting about it.

So it has the obsession with what I call "tic-tics",

or small pieces applied everywhere. It even applies to the teapot,

this is like a painting where there is a big square and a small square.

These additions, like a Tektonik.

So it's one ideology applying to everything.

It's like a signature. They signed everything in the same way.

What I personally find very touching and moving

when you look at the late work, is that first you have this

real desire to invent yet another different type of language.

So now it mixes figuration and abstraction.

But what I find very curious is at that point Malevich often

signed his work with the black square,

including his own self-portrait.

So he very clearly seems to be saying,

"I made this, I'm the author of this.

"I'm not denouncing this, but now I make something very different."

I think that it was a symbol.

It was maybe like a branding.

Not to say it in a cynical way, but I think it was his sign.

As he fell ill and knew that he was soon going to die,

he very carefully began to plan his funeral.

He instructed one of his students, Sutin, to work on his coffin.

This was set up - he was laid out on his bed, dying,

the coffin was standing there. The coffin mimicked Suprematist design.

There's the black square hanging above,

there's a circle, there's a cross,

all the elementary shapes -

and in the end, as he had died and the funeral procession moved through

the city, a black square was mounted in front of the car.

People were waving flags with the black square, and lo and behold,

his gravestone became a black square also.

Going back to see all that work again

reminds you again of the power of that period and that work.

And it's also great to see it all together in one space.

I think that my fascination with Malevich many years ago

is different than it is now.

I' still very moved by them, but

they are obviously intended for something else. I now read them

always as a painting implying an architecture,

and I'm not sure that that was always intentional.

They are almost like kind of floating worlds.

And I think what it implied in architecture is that

obviously they don't literally float.

Maybe eventually there will be a time when

buildings no longer need a kind of gravity to land on the ground,

they just hover above ground.

But in this case they form kind of galaxies or worlds.

And I find that really very exciting.