Customer Reviews

Zaha Hadid - Space for Art: Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati - Lois & Richard Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art

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1 star:		(1)

 

 

Fantastically unique and genuinely honest inside through the design concepts and completion of the Museum. A great book. Wish there were more like it.

Hadid made her name with slick drawings. As images they can be seductive, but it must be admitted that they have nothing to do with architecture. Hadid's buildings prove the point that her work is not really about architecture or space much as she professes otherwise. Remove her computer graphic program and the you get the crude interpretaion of ideas not fully worked out, passing themselves off as a building. The CAC was designed on screen without any reference to site or context, and it shows. There is no attempt to adress scale (human or urban), and the massing is loud and arrogant. ("Look at Me" - it screams.) Sadly for Cincinatti, they are stuck with this amatuerish and crude building. As for the book, it is predicatable in its praise and cliched in its language. The photos are irritating insofar as they make difficult views more unreadable than they need be. I can't help wondering if this is just a trick that weas deployed because there are no satisfying compositional views within this building that could be taken. Hadid should stick to drawings where she cannot do so much damage to our urban centers.