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.