Kazimir Malevich: The Latest Architecture and News

This video, presented by the BBC, takes a look at the work of Zaha Hadid as inspired by her favorite artist: the Russian Suprematist painter Kazimir Malevich. Featuring interviews with the dame herself, the narrative looks all the way back to Hadid’s origins, including her time at the Architectural Association School in London. It was there that she designed “Malevich’s Tektonik,” a hotel along the Thames River based upon the works of Malevich. Hadid believed that this work radically drove the architectural outlook she would employ for the remainder of her career:

“I was very fascinated by abstraction and how it really could lead to abstracting plans, moving away from certain dogmas about what architecture is. That project really liberated me, freed me from all these rules.”

Check out the video, currently on display as part of the Zaha Hadid retrospective at the Venice Biennale, for more on how Hadid drew inspiration from the Russian artist.

Pier Vittorio Aureli's collection of thirty 'non-compositional' drawings, exhibited as part of a series entitled The Marriage of Reason and Squalor, will open at London's Betts Project architecture gallery tomorrow (8th October 2014). The drawings, in development since 2001, are part of an ongoing investigation into "what, in the absence of a better definition, Aureli has described as ‘non-compositional architecture’." This term, referring to the work of art historian Yve-Alain Bois who was himself prompted by the ambitions of the constructivist artist Alexander Rodchenko, is used to describe works that "aspire to the abandonment of composition and even the self of the artist." This will be Aureli's second recent exhibition in London following Dogma: 11 Projects, which was presented at London's Architectural Association in 2013.

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In an article for London's Royal Academy of Arts Magazine entitled Plane Sailing, Zaha Hadid discusses the influence of Russian Suprematist painter Kazimir Malevich on her own design work. In Hadid's early work, such as The Peak Blue Slabs (1982/83), the visual connections to Malevich's strict, regular shapes and lines are evident.

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