Contained explosions and play of form

ARTWALK

Zaha Hadid. Fifty five, global architectural diva. Most of her projects remain unbuilt and unrealised. New York's Guggenheim has just put up an engaging , tell-all show about the career of this larger-than-life architect.

But let's get this clear: Zaha Hadid is not your usual builder of great buildings. This exhibition certifies this defiance "" both on the part of Hadid and her clients. Consequently, the Guggenheim's show is more drawings, a few models, but very few photographs of any completed work. Much of this has been blamed on the expenses involved in creating her visions and the paranoid client.

The fear is, in small part, not surprising if we were to judge Hadid by this show that's as disturbing as it is riveting. That's because it is part moonscape, part challenging the order of the way contemporary urban planners are forcing the idea today.

Through most of the show, what catches the eye are the drawings, painstakingly rendered, about the facets of each project. But in case after case, they are not just plans.

They force you to imagine, like their creator, the world as a sum of three-dimensional constructions that won't fit the way your mind expects them to. They force you to lay aside, if only for a few moments, spatial notions.

As a result, each dramatic drawing becomes a work of abstract art for the uninitiated. At best, you are allowed a small hint of Russian Constructivism. If you wish to see the vision contained, you have to train yourself to jive to the tune.

In a characteristic work made as drawings for the Irish Prime Minister's residence, she creates a dense, private garden, a kind of point where noise is eliminated. Around it, the peace thins out and merges into the presumed cacophonic noise. But if you saw the work, it would not be easy to see this at once.

For starters, it is what she has herself called, more generically, a contained explosion. It's like science fiction, with the world, even an alien planet, seen from a distance. To see the Irish PM's real home, you have to become a bricklayer yourself "" build each wall, chop up the protrusions and fit them somewhere. You may as well be playing a video version of Lego.

Many praise Zaha Hadid for her unique ideas. Anyone who has even a passing acquaintance with Daniel Liebeskind will tell you that perhaps it's true. Great minds possibly think alike.

The gnashes and play of form that Liebeskind renders in real-time buildings is also on display in Zaha's drawings. With her close acquaintance with some of Europe's most radicals architects "" Rem Koolhass was her teacher in the 1970s "" this is not surprising.

But let's get back to the disturbing and riveting aspects of her work. The works are so abstracted, it's as if real people are not expected to live in them. Sure, people need to begin to appreciate spaces and grow into them, but Hadid's work is surprisingly barren of human habitation, or even a sense of it.

This becomes paradoxical because her newer work could work as a tongue-in-cheek response to the idea of the world-class city in many developing cities.

Just as unordered creations and organic bonds are fractured here, Zaha Hadid insists on chaos and the grey that oozes out of this creation.

If there is one thing to take home from the best known architect with the least structures to her credit, it is that some of the best minds in architecture are revisiting order with a punch.