I could hardly believe it, as an impressionable student, when I realised that
Zaha was painting images of how her buildings might look. So used had I become to interpreting the cypher of contemporary architectural drawing back then, that I had failed to appreciate she was drawing representationally...sometimes at least.
Others at the time were making their amazing drawings look more complicated than they strictly needed to be as a way of illustrating layers of meaning and understanding, rather than proposing what their buildings would look like. As a result, when those architects built, there was sometimes a disappointing gap between the drawn and the built manifestations. Hadid's buildings have never suffered from this particular form of overselling.
The architect and artist went on to develop her representational techniques of drawing, some of which became known as her Dot paintings. Some of the Vives building in Monpelier are on exhibition in the
Buchmann Galerie, Berlin from the 17
th April to the 23
rd of June. Although representational, these drawings do not show a finalised building as such, but leave open a measure of interpretation and therefore meaning to the viewer.
Pay the paintings a visit if you can.
