Tectonic Politics

This interview with the mighty Zaha Hadid is a reminder that while the US economy maintains a free market for the public sector and socialism for the military, architecture has for the last 25 years maintained a Constructivism for big business (and its art theme parks) and Historicism for the public. The Constructivist strain in her work has often been commented on- the angularity of Konstantin Melnikov, the furious dynamism of the drawings of Iakov Chernikhov have been seriously developed, built on and actualised in her work, while her first project was an adaptation of Malevich's Architektons to the area around Charing Cross station where an unlovely postmodernist hulk now squats.



This isn't necessarily limited to form. The only commissions being galleries and the required skyscrapers in places like Dubai, the option simply isn't there anymore for architects to do anything that can affect everyday life; "What I would really love to build are schools, hospitals, social housing. Of course I believe imaginative architecture can make a difference to people's lives, but I wish it was possible to divert some of the effort we put into ambitious museums and galleries into the basic architectural building blocks of society." The rise of the museum as theme park necessitates the deaestheticisation of an increasingly conservative everyday life, the Tate Modern and Thames Gateway cottages are part and parcel of the same process.



It's fitting then that her first work in the UK is a cancer care centre rather than in Nicholas Serota's World of Adventures. And aside from this, it's refreshing in an age of architectural tweeness someone saying ' I don't design nice buildings - I don't like them'.