建筑专业英语课文1.4(华中科技大学).docVIP

1.4 Great Architects and Their Masterpieces 1.4.1 Zaha Hadid — Space for Art Architectural expectations for a museum are always high because of the aspiration that the structures themselves might be works of art. But hopes were especially elevated at the CAC, where the building would effectively become the only artifact permanently owned by a museum that pointedly does not collect. The CAC was not only commissioning a structure but also committing itself to an image that might affirm its long-standing record as an innovative, risk-taking institution. On several occasions—most famously in its support of a controversial exhibition of photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe—the CAC took stands that attracted national attention. With the choice of London architect Zaha Hadid, the museum affirmed its own traditions of “innovation and free inquiry” by hiring an architect with a comparable record of uncompromising integrity. Hadid’s building is quietly complicit with its surroundings because it grows indirectly out of the city. Sited opposite large-scale modern structures, but adjacent to older buildings in a more finely grained urban fabric, Hadid’s design pivots the newer neighborhood to the older, suturing two sides of a split boulevard. The architect recalls the scale of the adjacent older section because, conceptually, she took traditionally-scaled building volumes, laid them on their sides, and then rolled them toward Sixth Street like so many Cleopatras in a rug: the volumes stack lengthwise along the street, and the carpet turns up the back wall of the site. By looking at the urban context broadly and transforming buildings in the older city into abstract after-images, she automatically inherits the scale of the city in her stacked cluster. The materiality of the volumes, surfaced mostly in precast concrete panels left raw, refers to the newer concrete structures across the street. Like the older building neighbors, all slightly different, the volumes are variously si