Passing Through Zaha Hadid’s ‘Secret Garden’ Pavilion

Architizer News

Passing Through Zaha Hadid’s ‘Secret Garden’ Pavilion

April 26, 2012

Wander into Zaha Hadid’s pavilion in the “secret garden” at Milan Design Week, and you’ll discover the “complex beauty found in the organizational patterns of the natural world.” That’s what the press releases says, anyway. The pavilion’s blank walls don’t express much of anything, but they aren’t supposed to either. Instead, they function as a podium for the three marble panels Hadid designed for the event.

Working with Italian marble company Citco, the architect crafted large black tableaux cut with three-dimensional forms that mimic the fluid patterns and differentiating logic of natural systems. While the design of the panels may indeed be the result of complex programming, as Hadid suggests, complexity for its own sake isn’t always that interesting. Here, the architect puts “parametricism on a pedestal”–and one that looks strikingly similar to UN Studio’s Burnham Pavilion from 2009, at that–where the visual quanta of ordered complexity is praised as the only viable aesthetic model from which any future architecture might be devised. The marble vortices may be pretty, but it’s hard not to see Schumacher’s Cheshire grin in them.