Zaha Hadid’s architecture sees form and space pulled around, out of shape and into breathtaking, fluid spatial progressions.
Hugely theatrical and enticingly urbane her buildings have begun to transform notions of what can be achieved in concrete and steel, blending the revolutionary aesthetics of constructivism with the liquid organicism of expressionism.
The progression in Zaha’s buildings from the jagged, suprematist forms of the Vitra Fire Station (1993) to the awesome, flowing urban spaces of the Phaeno Science Centre, Wolfsburg (2005) show a consistent desire to question the traditional orthogonal plan, form always pulling towards an invisible mass, space and time warped and woven around structure. These are buildings which emerge from the city as sculpture yet which are also capable of knitting disparate blocks together, always surprising but also constantly making connections.
The Mesa table evolved from an architectural experiment which was similarly to do with creating connections. Elastika was an installation created in the Moore Building in 2005 for the Miami Art Fair. The brief had been a sculptural structure to revivify the 1921 building’s atrium.
Zaha’s proposal was an organic set of tentacles which linked spaces and floors across the atrium, defying changing levels and criss-crossing each other in mid-air. The effect was like a huge, sticky chewing gum pulled out of shape across the interior. It is a sci-fi alien piece which transforms the heart of the building, reaching across space. It looks as if the structure was attempting to resolve itself back into a single solid.
The Mesa table takes as its starting point a similar situation. Stripping the formal idea back to its constituent parts; ground; structure; surface, the design creates a world in between the two horizontal planes, a world which becomes structure but in which the voids express the form as much as the solids.
Zaha Hadid designed the Mesa table in London together with architect Patrik Schumacher. Project Designer was Saffet Kaya Bekiroglu and in the project team were Chikara Inamura and Melike Altinisik. The client is the design-furniture company Vitra.
