Visionary Spaces:
Zaha Hadid’s Exhibition Design for
the Deutsche Guggenheim
"25" at Deutsche Guggenheim, atrium, Photo: Mathias Schormann
A spheric interior landscape, organic and technical at the same time – the
interior of the Deutsche Guggenheim has been radically redesigned for
“25”, the anniversary show for the Deutsche Bank Collection. The brains
behind this futuristic exhibition design in Zaha Hadid, whose creations
are among the most exciting that modern architecture has to offer. A
portrait by Ulrich Clewing
When a critic once asked
Zaha Hadid if her buildings were about the “destruction of reality,” she
gave an interesting answer. In the first place, she said, it depended on
what reality he was referring to. And in the second place, gravity was
“still architecture’s greatest challenge – the fact that objects always
have to ‘land’ at some point.” Which goes to prove two things: on the one
hand, Zaha Hadid has a hard time accepting alleged certainties; when in
doubt, she prefers to pose a counter-question. On the other hand, she is
quite clear that the basic laws of physics apply to her as well.
Exhibition design for "25" at Deutsche Guggenheim
Photos: Mathias Schormann
Only this Iraqi-born,
London-based architect could have come up with the visionary exhibition
design for “25”. Zaha Hadid, who in 2004 became the first woman to receive
the prestigious Pritzker Prize
, the “Nobel Prize for Architecture,” has also conceived something highly
unique for the
Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin – a design that goes well beyond the usual
framework of exhibition design. For this anniversary show, she’s designed
a biomorphic, architectonic complex reminiscent of a system of
communicating tubes or pipes, and which also incorporates the neighboring
Deutsche Bank Unter den Linden. It reflects the unusual concept of the
exhibition: 25 godparents chose their personal favorite works from the
Deutsche Bank Collection – from Classical Modernism through to recent
contemporary art.
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The godparent’s selections are complemented by the
Curator’s Choice section, which takes at look at the future of the
Collection. The interior design for the exhibition provides an appropriate
framework for this lively, multi-faceted network of art. For Dr. Ariane
Grigoteit, director of Deutsche Bank Art, the relationship between
exhibition design and the art itself is part of the concept: “We found it
Zaha Hadid’s design especially interesting in view of the conditions at
the Bank, where the art has to react to the existing architecture and the
daily work environment. Zaha Hadid very skillfully transferred this
constellation to the exhibition situation. Her symbiosis of workplace and
exhibition space challenges the art while also protecting it.”
Exhibition view, "25" at Deutsche Guggenheim, Photo: Mathias Schormann
For Deutsche Guggenheim, Hadid created an interior landscape that alternates
between the organic and the inorganic, the natural and the highly
artificial. Hadid says, “Visitors will have the feeling that they are
entering a foreign, somewhat bizarre world, which, like an obstacle
course, invites one to transverse and explore it.” The dominant motif of
the exhibition space is the concave inward curve, extended and stretched,
drawn out like a hose or contracted and tugged around – the visitor is
everywhere surrounded by dips and curves, smooth transitions, niches and
rounded-out shapes on which the paintings of the anniversary exhibition
are hung like precious jewels.
The architecture is then continued
into the atrium of the building in a kind of inversion. Here, concave
cones, irregular pyramids, slender shafts, and rotund growths rise up, the
very forms from the additions of the architectonic “body” in the
exhibition hall. Zaha Hadid’s concept is so complex that it would have
been unthinkable without the aid of modern technology. Only ten years ago,
a design of this kind would never have come about simply because the
necessary programs hadn’t yet been written; nor did computers exist that
were capable of handling the vast amounts of data.
Vitra Fire Station, Weil am Rhein
Photo: Hélène Binet
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