New Fields of Architecture: Hal Foster on Zaha Hadid

With this article on Zaha Hadid—the subject of a retrospective currently on view through October 25 at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York—Hal Foster inaugurates a series of occasional essays on contemporary architects. The careers of several prominent designers have lately matured to the point where their shape, scope, and significance may now be grasped, in part through new exhibitions and publications. More important, architecture has once again captured the imagination of the public, which has come to view it as a principal medium for the branding of institutions of many sorts. In this service, architecture has attracted some of the attention once devoted to art; at the same time architects have shown an increased intimacy with artists—not only through the great prominence given to art museums but also through a shared interest in imagemaking and space-shaping. Finally, perhaps even more so than art today, architecture focuses urgent questions about new kinds of representations and media, materials and technologies. In fact, as was the case a century ago, it may be in architecture that we can best glimpse the look of modernity today.