The Walkability of Architecture:Conceptual Diagrams of Circulation in the

Work of Zaha Hadid

Andrew Furman, M. Arch, ARIDO, IDC, IDEC, IFIThe School of Interior Design, Faculty of Communication & DesignRyerson University350 Victoria Street, Toronto, OntarioCanada, M5B 2K3adfurman@ryerson.ca

AbstractKey projects of Zaha Hadid Architects are discussed from the lens of an activetransportation advocate. Her early paintings and spatial diagrams of unbuilt proposalsdemonstrate a strong connection to movement and energy that championbuilding/sculpting. Later, realized environments made evident that early expressions ofcirculation comprised a key ingredient in the built work. Projects connect to the urbangrid where it matters most: the manipulation of a ground plane that is liberated fromtypical city standards and re-incorporated into the project and made plastic.

Andrew Furman is an assistant professor at Ryerson School of Interior Design. He hasbeen exploring active transportation issues and how they intersect with InteriorDesign, Architecture, and Urban Planning as tactics for positive change in designthrough education, research, and design/art practice.

The Walkability of Architecture: ConceptualDiagrams of Circulation in the Work of ZahaHadid

Andrew Furman, M. Arch, ARIDO, IDC, IDEC, IFI

Urbanity & walkingGeoff Nicholson, in his book on the history of Pedestrianism: The Lost Art of Walking,talks about how he loves to walk in New York, a city that was imagined as a fresh grid,on an island, with a long central green space; a rather formal sounding concept for aplace to walk. Yet the world over, is entranced with its uniqueness.

He acknowledges that the grid does ‘exert control, on both drivers and walkers, andthe numerical arrangement means it’s hard to get thoroughly lost in Manhattan.However, within that structure people’s eccentricity, waywardness, hostility, andmadness are free to manifest themselves and run wild. Perhaps a more random or“organic” structure would create, indeed necessitate, more self-control.’

I imagine Zaha Hadid on her first visit to Manhattan, and how it must have seemed toher, so different than her studies in London, and her early years in Baghdad, and studyat the American University in Beirut. New York is congested, yet people walk forenjoyment and because it is sensible to get around the city by foot with less frustrationthat driving.

Figure 1. NY street scene. Pedestrian bridge seen overhead.

Where is architectural interest in the pedestrian?The field of Architecture has created incredible forms, rooms, and optic experiences. Ithas also promoted utopist thought and proposed starting to rebuild our world’s citiesfrom scratch. Within all this discourse about rebuilding and renewing there wasn’tmuch said about the pedestrian experiences in this new world. They weren’t entirelyforgotten; renderings represented people on the periphery, in balconies, and in parkingstructures. It seems that a manifesto for pedestrians was not to be.

For decades, the emphasis on modern planning was on openness, access to light, andfresh air. This does tend to sound like: ‘why don’t we go for a walk, out of doors, alongthe sidewalk to the park,’ or something to that effect. This changed quickly with thegrowth of private automobile ownership and the work undertaken to facilitate smooth

flows from door-to-door travel, with freeway designs. The pedestrian was now a driverin the architectural scheme, travelling from one beautiful modern experience to thenext, a tourist of design. This auto environment of large-scale signs and parking lotsfronting the street was succinctly discussed by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brownin their radical-for the time, book, Learning from Las Vegas. Zaha Hadid came of age inthis era of post-modern irony. No wonder she looked for texts about hope andpromise—she found it in the Suprematist vision of space, all spaces, that spoke aboutthe need to unite and relate everything in the world.

Figure 2 Highway. Image from automobile, GTA, Ontario, 2010

Walking, InspirationArchitecture doesn’t appear to have very many walking enthusiasts. There are therenderings by Piranesi of infinite spaces, and the introduction of real images of peoplewalking and inhabiting public space in Peter and Alison Smithson’s projects. Certainlynothing approaching the conceptual action-art of artists such as Richard Long’sWalkscapes, begun in 1967, and Andy Goldsworthy’s forest treks to find naturalmaterials for his art.

Figure 3 Richard Long. Artist. A walk back and forth across a field, 1967

Early modernist pioneering thought and practice regarding pedestrian movement (evenif it was confined to inside buildings) was the Swiss-born architect Le Corbusier. Hisoffering was the beauty of Villa Savoye in Paris, with its elegant idea to introduce aramp and open-air rooftop in the home that managed to create in the composition anendless series of spatial relationships. In contrast to the human-powered scene of VillaSavoye he switched ideas, designing a vast new order of wide highways and promoted

a future of identical high-rises and vast unprogrammed, open land. Where waspedestrian activity in this new urban space? How did citizens obtain groceries andperform other banal daily rituals? His mark on Architecture was deep, and it has takendecades to come to terms with our collective building attitudes and how they feelisolated from one another, for the most part. Architects and designers were looking atthe art making world of land art and conceptual art of established masters, such asLong and others, but they also look elsewhere, in contemporary artists, for inspirationand to recall those early principles of modernism.

Figure 4. Le Corbusier, Villa Savoye. Bird’s eye view,rooftop area sketch from image. 1928/9

His contemporary, the Viennese/Paris based Architect Adolf Loos, explored the notionof a continuous circulation system of interlocked rooms (Raumplan) at the domesticscale. Urbanistically he was more of a realist and planned insertions into the urbancore. For example, he thought about the opportunity to provide families with split-levelapartments in elevated ‘streets’ that would create topography that was quasi-public.Both understood that to elevate the street it would have repercussions with people’sbehaviour, and that this was a prototype for a walking-speed urbanism.

Figure 5. Adolf Loos, Apartment walk-up proposal, sketch from model, 1930’s

Within the specific discourse of modernist architecture, and everything that hasfollowed it, interest in the pedestrian has not been satisfactorily addressed. We canask: why such interest in circulation and movement (for architecture) but not muchabout the surrounding context? Who then, is responsible for stitching all these new

buildings together into the urban mix?It might have a lot to do with scale, and how much time a designer puts towardsintegrating their project into the urban network.

Memorable EpisodesIt must have to do with an interest in movement and porosity. Zaha Hadid states thata defining idea is to draw ‘public space into a building’s interior to make a series ofpublic rooms in the city. This is partly a response to living in London, where thebuildings tend to be fortified and public spaces come about by accident than design.Porosity suggests a new kind of urbanism, composed of streams or flows of movementthat cut through the city fabric.’ (Hadid,2003).

It has been said that architecture is (was?) a paper profession—that the work isremoved and formalized onto paper, and concerns were made in the second part ofthe last century about too much conceptual thought masquerading for actual talent inbuilding, or realizing spaces for the public good. There is some truth in this belief, butlike any artistic undertaking, there has to be experimentation and freedom to create inorder to make a good project. Zaha Hadid’s design search never leaves the realm ofsketches and the freedom of the paper or canvas for too long. It is here that theconnections so longed for by modernists (and those continuing the modernconversation) can be explored before being committed to cement and steel.

One of the key strategies in the design of a space or building is the strength of thecirculation concept. Peter Cook describes it frankly as such: ‘buildings can almost bedivided into two categories: first, those in which the procedure from the entrance tothe room in which you will spend most time is a crashing bore, a forgettableexperience, etc; secondly, those in which the business of working your way towardsour destination is a memorable and episodic experience. The stay in the room ispredictable, so the with to escape from it and return to the rest of the building – Inorder to ferret around and discover more – might take over.’

Contemporary experiments with public circulation, streets both internal and externalare increasing in frequency, and architects are starting to pay attention. Some recentexamples of streets that have elements of the interior about them show that there isgenuine public interest and respect for building projects that extend the experience ofthe city street. Take the following images of 3 urban projects; in Dublin, Munich, andNew York, as examples of weaving surprise and delight into the everyday experienceof walking in the city core; new courtyards and passages were carved and added tothe Temple Bar commercial/college neighborhood. Shown is an open stair/hall thattakes you to other interconnected courts and lively streets.

Figure 6. Temple Bar, Dublin, Ireland, pedestrian path, 2004

.Figure 7. Fünf Höfe, pedestrian courts in Munich, sketch of site plan.

Herzog & de Meuron, 2002- 2008

Figure 8. Fünf Höfe, passageway beside courtyard, Herzog & de Meuron, 2002- 2008

Figures 7 and 8 are from a commercial/arts development in the center of Munich. Theplanning intersects five dominant pathways towards the center of the space, all usedby strollers, bicyclists, parents pushing prams and a steady stream of tourists. Whatimpresses in this space is the attention to the concrete flooring, and the natural skylitspaces that provide a warm glow of space to the shops and various programs alongthese internal public interior streets.

Figures 9 and 10 are from an ongoing construction project in New York; the elevatedHighline, and urban filament ‘ribbon’ typology, located in the Chelsea part of the city.The Highline project has been receiving a great deal of media attention, largelybecause of the form the park takes, but I imagine that it also has to do with theexceptional experience of slow walking that is uninterrupted and offering views of thewaterfront and emerging projects drawn to the area’s revitalization since 2000.

Zaha Hadid takes this approach to urban filament public interiors, (Furman, 2010) onestep further, in that her spaces are carved and the floor plate’s non-standard shapeyields multiple programmatic possibilities by the users of the space. Some of these

projects will be touched on in this paper to show the range of pedestrian experiencesin her projects (note: There are three general types of urban filaments considered asexisting or emerging in the city; they are the interior eventspace, public interiors, andribbons).

Figure 9. Highline, NY, pedestrian ribbon, area renovation as of 2011, sketch formdiagram, 2000-

Figure 10. Highline, NY, Azure Magazine Cover, Toronto, 2011

A painted mapZaha Hadid first explored the complex relationships of the city through an unorthodoxroute for an architecture student of the 70’s--traditional painterly techniques; whereshe expresses the relationships of things in the world with emotions through the use ofbold juxtapositions of colours. Her interest in Russian Suprematism and Constructivism,activated by her instructors at the AA (Architectural Association in London) is anongoing exploration of colour ‘based on the energies released either in the process offormation, of motion or of spatial mapping.’ (Fontana-Giusti, 2004)

Hadid’s paintings of city space do not adhere to standard conventions—there is no oneorthogonal view, rather, there may be multiple viewpoints simultaneously visible, andthe colours do not correspond to what might be built. Instead, this mapping exercise isa way of testing new techniques and ways in which to occupy the city. The imagebelow is an urban filament ‘ribbons’ type. (Furman, 2010) Hadid had been asked in1988 to consider the future of Berlin, prior to the historic event the following year. In

her painting exploring possible futures, there are multiple diagrams for new ways ofbuilding along and around the edge conditions of the wall; corridors were imagined asbeing green urban carpets, the image is a fragment of one of the diagrams—it isreminiscent of the underground shopping zones in Toronto and Montreal, and morepotently, it has a similar energy to the Highline elevated park in NY that is currentlybeing completed in stages.

Figure 11. Zaha Hadid. Berlin 2000, fragment, sketch of original painting 1988

Zaha Hadid’s circulation strategiesHadid ‘puts all her energies into activating this ‘urban ground floor’ but quite contraryto modernism, her architecture does not grow out of the ground; instead it approachesit from above.’ (Ruby, 2004) As in her giant-size paintings, Hadid’s architecture hasmany complex embedded layers. If one were to trace out the strategies in one of herprojects, it would contain circulation layers from different zones of the site andsurrounding area. There are unique structural solutions that disappear within the skinof the building—in order for her team and her to study the basic space-makingproblems of form: walls, floor, ceiling, roof and ground.

Figure 12. Zaha Hadid. The Peak Competition, sketch of rendering, 1982-83.

While just emerging out of her education at the AA, she won the international PeakCompetition in Hong Kong in 1982-83. Figure 12 shows one of many painted views, inthis case a dramatic view looking up at an arcing walkway connecting a building withanother element in the design. What set the project apart was the exuberance andscale of the invention; there really was a lot to scan, so many images, colours, andexploded architectural drawing conventions shown. This was one of the projects thatset her approach to site and context. There is a weaving of stone and built form thatrecalls some Wright approaches to siting, but then the images become more and moreexplosive, suggesting the dynamic circulation developed for the hotel type.

Figure 13. Zaha Hadid. Vitra Fire Station, Dusseldorf, sketch from image, 1990- 94

This image shows the playful ramp that encourages pedestrian movement up ontoThe roof of the station in Weil am Rhein, Germany, at the large Vitra furniturecomplex. For all the sharp planes and energy that it possesses, it is the gentle sweepof the ramp and how it is situated to relate to the sidewalk, that speaks eloquently tosomeone approaching.

The Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati offers a clear premise for itsparti-6 floors of gallery space interconnected with a bold painted steel stair, sweepingupwards to the top level from the street below. Hadid sculpts a ‘carpet’ from the streetupwards to take advantage of natural light above from the skylight. Pedestrians areencouraged to move upwards through the spaces; temporary exhibits ensures that thelevels will offer new experiences

Figure 14. Zaha Hadid. Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art,Cincinnati, Ohio, sketch of section, 1998- 2003

Figure 15. Zaha Hadid. Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art,Cincinnati, Ohio, Axonometric view, 1998- 2003

Pathways and Landscape UrbanismThe Cincinnati building is, from the exterior, a conventional-appearing structure. It is inthe interior that the floor plates open up to a tall courtyard with crisscrossingstaircases. In some of the other projects discussed in this paper the pathway logic, orcirculation has more opportunity to extend its reach, for example, if the ‘carpet’extended out to fill the road/street, even with another paving material than asphalt, itmight be enough to consider temporarily closing off parts of the street for specialevents. This type of urban engagement with site, attitudinally speaking, references thegrowing approach to knitting pedestrian and site issues known as Landscape Urbanism.

This growing body of work tackles complex issues of site through the multidisciplinarydesign team. Hadid’s work seems to be placed between the traditional domain of sitewhere the bounding box defines all urban interventions, and the other approach is thelarge urban planning scheme, where almost everything is open todialogue/collaboration.

Corridors & PassagesThe premise of white boxes for a gallery have been challenged repeatedly in the lastcentury. Hadid explores in her paintings for the Maxi: National Museum of XXI CenturyArts project in Rome, a snaking set of ribbons that relate to the existing urbancondition adjacent to the former army barracks.

The design begins with a ‘prefiguring upon a directional route connecting the River toVia Guido Reni, the museum encompasses both movement patterns extant anddesired, contained within and outside.’ (Futagawa, 2007) The building skews to relateto the context: ‘In addition to opening a pedestrian connection through the city block,the scheme acknowledges the angled street grid beyond Via Masaccio – twisting themuseum building to align with a nearby streetcar line.’

The museum is a stacked, winding series of concrete walls that challenge the notionthat the wall is where art ought to go, a flat wall at that. Hadid opens the circulationinto a series of extruded bundles that might be corridors, but they are too large, vastin fact, so one thinks of simple movement but the size and geometry of these urbanenclosed pedestrian-highways are to be programmed with contemporary artworks.The public room is now blurred in terms of a clear threshold, and the experience of thismodern gallery continues the ideas of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim spiral ramp inNew York.

Within the gallery spaces themselves, the ceiling containing many thin, tall ribs, arehanging opportunities for partitions and artworks. This gesture is civic and street-inspired, for it suggests the colourful banners, flags and street signs that hang fromlight standards and buildings along cultural zones outdoors. By letting the space bevery flexible, the gallery can begin to draw people indoors with its drama of vastwalkways, and variety of exhibits to come.

Hadid’s architecture challenges the predictability of large public interior spaces withstrategies that blur the distinction between sequential experience; it defiesexpectations-- street-corridor-function-specific room. The challenging volumes of theMAXXI project challenge the art gallery typology, the idea of short-cuts, and curation.

Figure 16, Zaha Hadid. MAXXI: National Museum of XXI Century Arts, Rome.sketch image of interlocking arrangement of corridors/galleries, 1998- 2008

Hadid’s Phaeno Science Center project in Wolfsburg, Germany, realized 2000-2003 is asculpturally strong street-level expressive combination of entryways and mixedvehicular/pedestrian circulation. There is, undeniably a powerful mood created simplywith this composition of circulation spaces. It isn’t dependent on pyrotechnics of facadetextures or a need for an iconic form to distinguish itself from its context that typifiesmuch of the firm’s work. Hadid says (that) ‘the idea was to create a public terrain.’(Schumacher, 2009) It, like the MAXXI project places pedestrians right into the keyaxis, privileging the view of the visitor by foot.

Hadid’s Science Center begins with the idea of raising the enclosed spaces off theground—a schema that borrows from many early modernists, from Le Corbusieronwards, yet she is gripping the surface as it were, while she elevates the scienceprogram upwards. The ground is sculpted, terrain undulates with canted, giant ‘legs’holding the structure with a softly lit underbelly of space that suggests randompassages, for both automobile and pedestrian alike.

I live in a city that has a mix of late Victorian and more modern versions of circulation;from sidewalks and narrow streets to suburban streets with no sidewalks. This latterexperience is interesting because it forces driver and walker to watch one anothermore carefully, and with the respect there is an awareness of the other. It doesn’talways work, but the experience is positive, which leads one to wonder why it isn’tused more often in urban plans and conceptually by architects for a building. As anexperiment in approach and destination this is a dramatic building.

Criticism about the center is targeted at the overall complex of different buildings(other structures not by Hadid’s office) that, ultimately does not integrate thepedestrian flow as well as it could have. This speaks to the importance of defining theoverall strategy of pedestrian flows, whether it is a complex or a neighborhood in a citycore.

Figure 17, Zaha Hadid. Phaeno Science Centerproject in Wolfsburg, Germany, ground plan sketch, 2000-2003

Figure 18, Zaha Hadid. Phaeno Science Centerproject in Wolfsburg, Germany, exterior perspective sketch, 2000-2003

Ambiguity and AnalogyPedestrian circulatory systems in urban planning and municipal models differs from theideals of beauty and resolution that architects and designers struggle with in theirworks. There is the difficult matter of bridging the old and the new in the city, and thereality of this complexity is that things and intent often become ambiguous.

New urban plans by Hadid are not nihilistic, post-modern, or apologetic—they cutthrough urban tissue, unabashedly floats out in space, and dares you to imagine whatthe other side will always be wondrously alive and free. A Suprematist compositionresults, where every element can assert itself in relation to the other components.Hadid has remained on this trajectory since the start of her career. It will be interestingto see how some of her urban planning propositions fare out in the market.

Hadid’s work deals often with analogies, in the generative concepts that help one tounderstand the motive for her spaces. As spaces of walking, the analogies are powerfulideas of movement- take for example the image of twisting a bundle of long reeds,your hands twist in opposite directions, there is a stress, a marvelous result ofexplosive energy, and a form derived from natural processes. For example, the designfor a Habitable Bridge in London, designed in 1996, has a tremendous presence inHadid’s oeuvre, considering the wildly curving and complex geometries of recentprojects, this work is relatively orthogonal in its massing. Two thin rectangularbookends on either side of the river have an attenuated bridge/street connecting them.There are ‘free-flowing public access ‘streets’ – with a mixture of commercial andcultural spaces – on the lower levels and private areas…floor plates distort and split tocreate voids that maximize the river’s presence.’ (Betsky, 1998)

‘The street’s continuity, meanwhile, is founded upon the alignment of juxtaposedfacades. Though its function is now reduced to transit alone, the street retains a greatimportance.’ Urban space necessitates efficiencies, and according to Lefebvre thestreet is a vital ingredient in what makes up the city, and it is the arrangement offacades on either side of the street, that give it the feeling of publicness so key to goodcivic design. Zaha Hadid’s architecture recaptures some of this logic of the street, andenters into a discussion with modern planning thought through her calligraphic style ofdrawing and painting her version of a street scene. Lebbeus Woods, cautions however,against total designed cities by any one vision: ‘It is one thing to imagine Hadid’s

buildings as anchors in a broadly diverse landscape, but it is quite another toimagine entire districts that must conform to her designs.’

ConclusionZaha Hadid Architects concern their practice with the flow of pedestrians through theirpublic portfolio of work. It is a consistent attitude applied to different programs andlocations. Circulation is never obviously worked out; each building is a form unto itself,releasing energy and connecting to the larger urban realm surrounding each project.The body of built work captures the energy in the early paintings and schemes fromZaha Hadid’s conceptual proposals.

Difficult to categorize, her buildings require exploration and attention; details areintegrated with the overall parti of the project. Structure, enclosure, and materialdevelopment are coordinated with the overall form.

Emerging projects in the design development stage in Zaha Hadid’s office continue toexplore the bond between the street, the realm of the pedestrian experience with theoverarching form-making of her buildings—that are no longer strictly speaking separatefrom the street. They are a part of it as well.

Thanks to Enoch Wong, student at RSID for assistance with figure drawings.

Bibliography

Betsky, A. (1998) Zaha Hadid The Complete Buildings and Projects, London, Thames &Hudson.

Catherine, S. (2010) MAXXI, The Architectural Review, 228, 1361. pp. 44-53.

Fontana-Giusti, G. (2004) A Forming Element. In: Schumacher, P., and Fontana-Giusti,G. ed. Zaha Hadid Complete Works: Texts and References. New York, RizzoliInternational Publications Inc.

Futagawa, Y. (2007) Global Architecture Document 99: Zaha Hadid, Tokyo, A.D.A.EDITA.

Furman, A. (2010) Urban filaments: from passageways of leisure-oriented space toemergent urban form, Brebbia C. A., Hernandez, S.,Tiezzi, E. eds. The Sustainable CityVI: Urban Regeneration and Sustainability. London, WIT Transactions on Ecolgy andthe Environment, Vol. 129, WIT Press. pp. 265-274.

Hadid, Z. (2003) Movement and Porosity. In: Tschumi, B., & Cheng, I. ed. The State ofArchitecture at the Beginning of the 21st Century. New York, The Monacelli Press.

Lefebvre, H. (1991,1974) The Production of Space, Cambridge, USA, Blackwell.

Nicholson, G. (2008) The Lost Art of Walking; The History, Science, Philosophy, andLiterature of Pedestrianism, New York, Riverhead Books.

Noever, P. ed. (2003) Zaha Hadid Architecture, Ostfildern-Ruit, Hatje Cantz Verlag.

Ruby, A. (2004) Multiple Horizons: On a leitmotif in the Architecture of Zaha Hadid. In:

Schumacher, P., and Fontana-Giusti, G. ed. Zaha Hadid Complete Works: Texts andReferences. New York, Rizzoli International Publications Inc.

Schumacher, P. (2009) Parametricism: A New Global Style for Architecture and UrbanDesign, Architectural Design, 79,4. pp. 14-23.

Woods, L. (2008) Drawn into Space: Zaha Hadid, Architectural Design, 78, 4. pp. 28-35.