Talk with Desley Luscombe: Zaha Hadid’s ‘Architecture’ of Painting

As an introduction to the book Zaha Hadid’s Paintings, Imagining Architecture this talk will explore distinctive paintings from Hadid’s early projects to reveal her nuanced and changing approach to developing architectural thought through painting. It asks, ‘What can painting contribute to architectural thought?’  

What first attracted me to the paintings of Zaha Hadid, back as far as the 1980s, was how each painting contributed to architectural debate by using only graphic means rather than rely on explaining complex ideas through writing. The paintings completed by her studio are intricate and their compositions when seen in exhibition communicate ideas through numerous spatially defined visual prompts. They work distinctively when viewed from a distance in comparison with when closely examined. They also work differently as a group focused on a project than when individually considered. As a group, they move beyond being unified ‘views’ of a building in situ to contribute an understanding of architecture that is intellectually nuanced.  

Each painting complicates what is meant by ‘the architectural’ as a disciplinary construct. In their detail, the paintings have compositional attributes adapted initially from her interpretation of early 20th century art practices, later expanding to encompass a responsiveness to the new spatial practices inferred by computer technologies. As a type of theoretical discourse, Hadid explained the paintings as if working like language. However, they do not strictly work like language, for while there is a layer of narrative, they structure a distinctively visual and compositionally networked logic. 

This talk will focus on three properties of the paintings explicitly examined in the book:  

• Their networked and layered pictorial space.  

• Their portrayal of subjective time and consciousness.  

• Their acceptance of distortion and spatial slippage. 

 What Hadid does with these attributes enables an experimentation transforming the basis of what is meant by the term ‘architecture’.  

Desley Luscombe is Emeritus Professor of Architecture at University of Technology Sydney, Australia. She held the position of Dean of Faculty of Design Architecture and Building 2004–2016 and continues to consult privately on architectural development in Sydney. Luscombe, a founding partner of Campbell Luscombe Architects (Sydney, Australia) has maintained leadership in the architectural profession throughout her career. Her current research focuses on twentieth–century architectural drawings. Her written work builds from her early book Picturing Architecture: Graphic Presentation Techniques in Australian Architectural Practice exploring architectural presentation drawings created between 1980-1990 in Australia. Luscombe’s scholarly articles are published in The Journal of Architecture, Angelaki and Architectural Theory Review. Their focus is on architectural drawings and sketches from the Renaissance to the modern including those by Gerrit Rietveld, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Peter Eisenman, and Zaha Hadid.