Zaha Hadid, Judith Turner

The juxtapositions of Zaha Hadid's architectural models and drawings§and Judith Turner's photographs of the architect's buildings§in this volume reveal that Hadid and Turner are complicit. There is§a clear agreement of sensibilities. Each understands the other.§In the first decades of Hadid's career, during which she collided§forms and designed in the fall-out, Hadid did not design wholes,§but buildings composed of fragments. Like Hadid - but unlike§most architectural photographers, trained and paid to document§buildings -Turner also does not photograph the whole, and rarely§includes the context: her camera sees fragments instead, a collage§of parts. Turner's photographs from this early period of Hadid's§work are fragmentary views of Hadid's fragmented buildings.§Hadid's vision lends itself to Turner's.§Hadid does not design with complete geometries in stable configurations,§but designs instead with incomplete or distorted geometries§that are dynamic and visually unstable. Turner does the same§in her photographs, cropping before a form completes itself in a§frame that leaves the rest of the form suggested outside the frame.§Hadid's work is abstract - a permutation of Modernism's trifecta§of point, line and plane. Turner's photography, too, is abstract§so that Turner's photographs of Hadid's buildings compound§the abstraction, arguably intensifying the three-dimensional§abstraction by compressing it into two. Hadid's neutral palette§of materials, especially concrete, takes on value in Turner's graphic§compositions of black, white and gray, counterintuitively giving§neutrality subtle intensity.§Hadid structures her designs dynamically with diagonal lines§and oblique planes playing with and against each other in threedimensional§fields. Likewise Turner works on the diagonal, always§positioning herself obliquely to buildings, shooting glancingly rather§than frontally: her diagonal position further dynamizes Hadid's§already energized diagonals. Often Turner doubles down on the§diagonality by cranking the camera's lens off its up-down axis to§heighten the architectural dynamism. Turning her photographic§angle lofts Hadid's already anti-gravitational architectural system§off the ground.§Joseph Giovannini heads Giovannini Associates, a design firm§based in New York and Los Angeles. He holds a Master in Architecture§from Harvard's Graduate School of Design. He has taught§at various Universities, among them Columbia University, University§of California in Los Angeles, and University of Southern California.§A graduate of Yale University, where he did his B.A. in English,§Giovannini also holds a Master of Arts degree in French language§and literature from the Université Paris-Sorbonne.§See also: Judith Turner, Seeing Ambiguity. Photographs of§Architecture, Edition Axel Menges, 2012.