Spiraling up to Utopia

A look at the late architect Zaha Hadid’s extraordinary, underacknowledged exhibition design for a Guggenheim show on Russian avant-garde art

Topics

Art & Architecture

Design for interior of museum, showing a ramp and circular ceiling in black and blue — Drawing for "The Great Utopia" exhibition, 1992, Zaha Hadid. Black ink/acrylic/watercolor on cream paper. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, 950083. © Zaha Hadid

Photo: Courtesy of the Zaha Hadid Foundation

By Maristella Casciato

Jul 07, 2022

In the two decades between the mid-1910s and the early 1930s, Russian avant-garde artists, armed with new insights into forms and materials, sought to realize the utopian aims of the Bolshevik revolution through artistic production.

Art and life, it seemed, could merge. Largely motivated by the social upheavals of October 1917, constructivist artists introduced radical innovations—Vladimir Tatlin’s abstract “material assemblages” and Kazimir Malevich’s geometric Suprematism, for instance—and changed the course of modernist art and concurrently, modern history.

The exhibition The Great Utopia: The Russian and Soviet Avant-Garde, 1915–1932, held at the Guggenheim Museum in New York from September 1992 to January 1993, was at the time the largest show ever mounted in an American museum on this topic. The retrospective presented the period’s vanguard artistic production in Russia, ending with Stalin’s competition for the Palace of the Soviets in Moscow. The extraordinary design of the exhibition is due to the visionary work of the late British architect Zaha Hadid (1950–2016), who created an accessible yet provocative exhibition in Frank Lloyd Wright’s vertiginous space at the Guggenheim Museum.

Design for a spiral tower, with gray geometric walls swirling around — Drawing for "The Great Utopia" exhibition, 1992, Zaha Hadid. Acrylic/pencil on cream paper. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, 950083. © Zaha Hadid

Photo: Courtesy of the Zaha Hadid Foundation

A spiral tower evokes architect Vladimir Tatlin’s (1885–1953) *Monument to the Third International*. Tatlin’s titanic spire is considered one of the manifestos of Russian constructivism, which aimed to reflect modern industrial society and urban spaces. In Hadid’s drawing, the tower rises from the museum atrium and soars upward, following the vertical direction of Frank Lloyd Wright’s elliptical space. On the right, display boxes project from the ramp galleries.

Hadid, Iraqi-born, was a major protagonist of architectural Deconstructivism, an imaginative and creative critique to the normative modernity of post-WWII design. Educated at the Architectural Association (AA) school in London, she soon excelled for her astonishing skills in space representation, which echoed the modes introduced by the Russian avant-garde. She began her phenomenal career in 1991 with the Vitra Fire Station building, which was soon transformed into an exhibition space. In 2002 she won the international competition for the globally acclaimed Guangzhou Opera House. Two years later she became the first woman to receive the prestigious Pritzker Architecture Prize, and a month before her sudden death in 2016, she became the first woman individually awarded the Royal Gold Medal from the Royal Institute of British Architects.

For The Great Utopia, Hadid repurposed Wright’s spiraling atrium to tell a story that moved visitors seamlessly up the ramp. Interruptions, created with three-dimensional projecting obstacles and screens with posters, pushed visitors to the edge of the ramp, allowing vertiginous perspectives to be seen at the same time.

Seventy-nine drawings, mostly perspectival views of Hadid’s innovative exhibition design, remain among the most evocative traces of this important exhibition. The drawings, all on square-format paper, have been part of GRI Special Collections since 1995.