ABSTRACT
This writing is focused on the series of early drawings and paintings by possibly the most famous female architect in the world, Zaha Hadid. The projects examined include Malevich’s Tektonik on Hungerford Bridge in London, The Museum of the Nineteenth Century at Charing Cross Station (1977–1978), and exhibition designs from the initial stages of Hadid’s career. The ideas stemming from Hadid’s interest in the Russian avant-garde, including the notions of weightlessness, gentle connection to the ground, and horizontal elevation, form the main argument. Most drawings and paintings from early stages of her career were never realized and exist as autonomous pieces of work.
The latter part of the paper is built up on Hadid’s statement on the influence of computer drawing on architecture, where she said in one of her last interviews in 2012, “What’s very sad is that thousands years of perfecting drawing disappeared in twenty years.” Hadid’s lamenting the loss of “artistry in drawing” is reflected on the current status of architectural drawing, where a computer can be seen at once as liberating, but instead of bringing innovation, it acts as a tool of continuing or repeating the familiar.
