There’s no such thing as bad publicity, they say. But I wonder whether Zaha Hadid – of whose past, present and future work a near-comprehensive survey opens at the Design Museum on Friday – would have agreed ten years ago, when she was on the wrong end of one of the most humiliating public snubs in the history of modern architecture.

She had beaten 250 other architects to win the competition to design Cardiff’s Opera House. Her entry, more like a giant glass necklace than any known theatre, caused a sensation. Unfortunately, the sensation was almost entirely negative, at least within Wales. The local press vilified the design and its maker. Populists claimed (wrongly) that if Cardiff built this “elitist” opera house it wouldn’t get its coveted new rugby stadium. Opera singers complained nonsensically that people would be able to see them undressing. And the Millennium Commission, which was stumping up most of the money, applied the coup de grace by describing the design as “insufficiently distinctive”, which was a bit like saying that the Atlantic is insufficiently wet.

And who was this Hadid anyway? She was swiftly belittled as a “paper architect”, because only one of her fantastical designs had ever been built – a fire station somewhere in Germany. And she was an outsider twice over: first as an Iraqi, albeit one who had studied and worked in London since the early 1970s; and secondly as a woman crashing into the men’s club at the top of British architecture. And a pretty mouthy woman, too, with opinions as strident as her architecture. She rubbed people up the wrong way.

Well, in Wales in 1996 she experienced a stinging backlash. For about three years afterwards, she later admitted, the stigma was so enormous that it was virtually impossible for her to get any projects off the ground. Indeed, her most prominent completed work in that period was the Mind Zone at the Millennium Dome. That’s how bad it got.

A drawing of the unbuilt Cardiff Bay Opera House is displayed, unapologetically and unashamedly, in the Design Museum show (the first major exhibition under the museum’s new boss, Deyan Sudjic). Indeed, much of the ground floor is taken up with designs for fantastical projects that never left the drawing-board.

By comparison with architects such as Lord Foster, who would be unlikely even to embark on a project without a firm commitment to build, Hadid entered the 21st century with just one finished permanent building to her name (the fire station), after more than 20 years in the business.

The most significant of the “paper” designs, perhaps, is a fine painting (Hadid is an international-class artist as well as architect) of the Peak, a gravity-defying apartment complex that she conceived back in the early 1980s for the heights overlooking Hong Kong. A rude riposte to the anodyne PostModernism that was then stifling architectural innovation, it looks like a series of jagged splinters stuck into the living rock. And, as with so much that comes from Hadid’s imagination, it seems partly to belong in some (extremely classy) sci-fi comic, and partly to be the result of some huge geological upheaval.

But if the show’s first part is largely a chronicle of unrealised visions, the rest demonstrates how impressively Hadid, now 56, has made up for lost time in the past decade. She employs 170 people at her Clerkenwell office (a converted school), and you can see why. Yes, her unbuilt projects still vastly outnumber the 15 or so Hadid buildings that actually exist. (Three of the biggest finished works are showcased here: a modern-art museum in Cincinatti; an elevated science centre in Germany that looks like a walking spaceship; and the BMW factory, in which the production-line snakes in and out of the office space so that even the accountants can gawp at the gleaming metal as it passes.)

All that is set to change in the next few years, as Hadid sends her lieutenants scampering with weird and wacky ideas to all corners of the globe. In Azerbaijan there will be a skyscraper for the state oil company; in Kazakhstan a new city square, perhaps the world’s first piece of largescale town-planning entirely devoid of right-angles or straight lines (another Hadid “signature”); in Dubai a performing arts space suspended over the sea; and in Guangzhou an opera house imagined as two giant boulders thrust out of the adjacent river.

These ongoing and future projects, more than 25 of them, are all portrayed on the exhibition’s second floor, sometimes in dazzling, aluminium-based illustrations that seem to glow and vibrate as you pass them. Trust Hadid, the world’s most flamboyant architect, to turn even her two-dimensional drawings into theatrical coups. Architecture exhibitions can be as soulless as kitchen showrooms, but here you can really feel the exuberant imagination behind the buildings.

And the protean energy, too, for the show contains not just architectural models and drawings but also some of Hadid’s startling furniture and knickknacks. There’s even a prototype car, and of course the obligatory handbag. The scale may be miniature compared with her buildings, but there’s no diminution of creative quirkiness, nor of the sense that fluid has been frozen in space. Here are tables, chairs and shelves that seem cast in a single, sinuously twisting curve – like a wave orthe sand dunes that the infant Hadid would have seen in the Iraqi deserts – and then realised in exquisite colours and materials.

Mind you, the prices are exquisite too. Hadid tables tend to start at £100,000. For a mere £130, however, you can now buy a set of her intriguingly off-kilter cutlery (though you get only five utensils for your money).

Perhaps the show’s most intriguing aspect is the evidence it provides that this architectural prophet is at last being honoured in her adopted land. Until last year, when she became the latest big-name architect to design one of Scotland’s Maggie’s Centres (drop-in clinics for cancer patients), Hadid had never had anything built in Britain. Now, however, the reactionaries had better brace themselves: five Hadids are on the way in London alone, not counting her temporary installation for the Serpentine Gallery this summer – a typically ingenious interweaving of giant parasols. They include her eye-popping Olympic Aquatic Centre, as well as a city academy (every fancy architectural practice has to do one, it seems).

Her critics used to declare her ideas “unbuildable”. Now the accusation has changed: her specified materials and designs are said to be so off-the-wall and untested that her projects inevitably run wildly over budget and time. The 2012 Olympics Aquatic Centre, for instance (though scaled down by Government decree), looks as if it will cost double its original £75 million budget. It’s a spectacular concept, like some graceful paper aeroplane – but £150 million for a swimming-pool? You have to ask how.

Another Hadid design, for Glasgow’s new Riverside Museum – set at the intersection of the Clyde and the Kelvin, and aptly shaped like a metallic wave – looks as if it will be three years late and £17 million over budget.

But innovation and ambition never come cheap in architecture. Just read what Wren’s exasperated contemporaries thought about him. Hadid is not merely designing buildings, she is reimagining domestic, corporate and public space. In her breathtakingly sensuous designs such mundanely separated entities as walls and ceilings, indoors and outdoors, cease to be. All are swept into the mighty curve, which itself seems to grow organically out of the landscape. Spine-tingling or spine-chilling, the show is nothing if not a brazen vision of the future.

— Zaha Hadid Architecture and Design, Design Museum, London SE1 (0870 8339955), from Fri to Nov 25

 这个女人实在是太有种了。。实在不能不喜欢。

 

 

 

 

Personal development is a fine art

by Max Landsberg

 

'The Times', 'The Job' January 25th.

 

    He was born in the same town as Gordon Brown, who, like Baroness Thatcher, is a fan. Who is he?

 

   

 

    HE WAS awkward, absentminded and had no head for business, according to his obituary in The Times. But today Adam Smith will have his reputation fixed as the father of modern economics as he becomes the latest historical figure to appear on the £20 note.
    Smith, who died in 1790, having lived out his days as a quiet Customs official with his mother, will become the first Scotsman to appear on a Bank of England note when he replaces Edward Elgar, the composer, next spring.

    He was the author of The Wealth of Nations, which made the case for free markets and free trade against the mercantilist philosophy of the 18th century, and which argued that individual self-interest would promote the common good "led by an invisible hand". His principles became the cornerstone of Britain's 19th-century industrial might.

    He was revered by Margaret Thatcher, and has also been championed by Gordon Brown, who argues that Smith stood for supporting the most vulnerable in society. The Chancellor is proud of having been born in the same town, Kirkcaldy, as the economist.

    The honouring of Smith was announced last night by Mervyn King, the Governor of the Bank of England.

    Giving the annual Adam Smith Lecture in Kirkcaldy, Mr King said: "It is sign of the resurgence of interest in Adam Smith that at almost every point on the political spectrum one can find people who claim Smith as their own."

    He praised Smith's writing as remarkable for its "comprehensive and eclectic examination of ideas and facts", and said that he had influenced the way the world thinks about the route to economic prosperity.

    There are more than a billion £20 notes in circulation, according to the Bank. The notes have an average lifespan of about two years.

    The new note will also carry a picture of the pin factory used by Smith to illustrate his observations and theories in The Wealth of Nations.

    At a time when manufacturing was in its infancy, Smith was the first to recognise the productivity gains from dividing of labour into specialised tasks. Next to the picture will be the quotation, "and the great increase in the quantity of work that results". Mr King said: "From next spring, when visitors to our country look carefully at their new £20 notes... I hope they will absorb the lesson that specialisation in production and trade across the world are the way to improve living standards in all countries. And perhaps when they return home they will press their own politicians to support the opening up of trade, which has been at the heart of the British Government's efforts to reform the world economy."

    Economists expressed their delight. Eamonn Butler, director of the Adam Smith Institue, a think-tank, said: "Smith is the father of modern economics. He was for free markets, deregulation, low taxes and individual freedom."

    The institute is building a £250,000 life-size bronze statue of Smith, which it hopes to place on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh next year.

   

   

    ^The new notes will feature Adam Smith and the pin factory he used to illustrate the benefits of the division of labour in his seminal work, which is revered by businessmen such as Bill Gates

 

 

 

   

 

 

 

 

   

- show us animals from a startling new angle  

    Bloom is an expert at catching animals in unexpected ways, as his new book, Spirit of the Wild, demonstrates.
    Flicking through the pages is a revelation. Brown bears in Alaska waiting in a waterfall for sockeys salmon; a polar bear suckling her two cubs, with a slit-eyed contentment; a congregation of chinstrap penguins, like a croud of suited commuters on a winter morning...

    These, and many more startling images, are the result of the 12 years Bloom has spent documenting the natural world. It was on a trip to his native South Africa that his obsession was sparked. "I'd been living in London for years and had a photo lab that worked with ad agencies. My day-to-day world was the Northern Line, Oxford Street and so on. I started doing wildlife photography on that trip, and it just look off."

    That's an understatement: his passion and the images that it produces have touched a collective public nerve. He published a previous book, Untamed, in 2004, which became a coffee-table favourite for its startling images. But Spirit of the Wild goes one step further in that the photographs are accompanied by quotes from the likes of Mahatma Gandhi and Emily Dickinson. As Bloom says, "The writings of these people have shaped our environmental sense of the world, so including their words helps to bring the images to life." The Spirit of the Wild photographs are also being used in huge open-air exhibitions, blown up to a massive scale. So far there has been one in Birmingham and one in Copenhagen - which attracted more than a million visitors in 80 days. A new one is currently taking place in Millennium Square, Leeds.

    But even in the more intimate context of the book, Bloom's images have a unique raw energy and a consistent message. "I want to convey the sentient nature of animals. I'm trying to blur the lines between them and us." Looking at his picture of a chimp, wonderingly turning his palm up to feel the splash of raindrops, you can certainly say he's achieved his aim. But Bloom wants to go further. "My pictures are about making people environmentally aware. I want them to realise the impact of habitat encroachment and global warming; what we as humans are doing to wildlife. If it can make them think twice about leaving the lights on and making unnecessary car journeys then I'll have achieved something."

    This respect for the environment infuses Bloom's approach. He always researches his subject before a trip and uses local guides. "You've got to understand the habitat and the animals you're trying to photograph. For example, grizzly bears like to know you're there, so you should make a loud sound as you approach and then they're usually fine. But with zebras you can't make any noise - they're incredibly nervy." Technique is important for getting the right shot. "You can't approach the animals like a hunter would; you've got to be aware of how they think. I make eye contact so you get the magic of the sparkle in the eye." Patience, combined with an ability to work quickly, is crucial. For the picture of a great white shark leaping out of the water, Bloom had to wait 16 days on a boat. "But someone timed the leap and it was over in two-thirds of a second." He's endured blazing heat and freezing temperatures. "The coldest I've put up with was 49 degrees below zero. That was pretty difficult."

    Despite all this careful preparation, Bloom believes that ultimately it's his passion for his subject that gives his photographs their power. "Every single image means so much to me. I'm driven by emotion and I always shoot from the heart."

 

 

   

    ^A hippopotamus and its calf wallow in the Okavango delta, Botswana

 

   
    ^ A chimpanzee in Monkey World, Dorset, holds out its hand to feel the warm summer rain.

 

   

    ^ An Asian bull elephant swims off the Andaman islands.

 

   

    A great white shark tosses a fur seal into the air in South Africa. Bloom had to wait 16 days to get this shot.

 

 

 

    "THE TIMES MAGAZINE" 28.10.06

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

   

    2002 Gateshead Millennium Bridge, by Wilkinson Eyre Architects 

    2001 Magna Science Adventure Centre, Rotherham, by Wikinson Eyre Architects 

    2000 Peckham Library, South London, by Alsop & Störmer 

    1999 Lord's Media Centre, London, by Future Systems

    1998 Imperial War Museum (aircraft collection), Duxford, Cambridgeshire, by Foster and Partners

    1997 Music School, Stuttgart, by Michael Wilford