Hans Ulrich Obrist: My first question is about exhibition design. There seems to be almost a forgotten history of exhibition design: In order to fight this amnesia, I thought it would be good to begin by asking you how you started to work on exhibition design, and what this medium means for you.



Zaha Hadid: Actually, it started with us doing our own exhibitions and always wanting to do something like hallucination in that space. The first show I had (the idea of the show goes back to '76 or '77) at the AA in the student shows where you try to do everything. We did these very large boxes, like architectonic fragments, which landed in the AA 'Member's Room. And we were accused of being imperialist by an well known architect who was speaking there at the time: the idea was that we had destroyed a perfectly nice English space. It was very curious, let's say. And then I did another show, in '82, in the same room, the Member's Room, where I was showing the renovations for a house in London which I was going to do in Eaton Place, and also wanted to make an installation in the space, and I wanted to put a black floor, but it had a wooden floor and they wouldn't let me use anything else, so I put plastic sheets and sand. And everybody was freaking out about these plastic rubbish bags, so I said "OK, so I want linoleum", so they just got me black boards. In all of the shows, we always wanted to do something with the floor, whether in the student works or with my own shows. And when we did a show in 1983, for the Peak, with all of the school, we also did these environments. So we started like that, not trying to do other installations but installations of our own stuff. Then we did the show at the Guggenheim The Great Utopia in 1992.



HUO: Could you tell me more about these early AA shows?



ZH: We only did one room at the AA, it was more of a grab-bag. For example we did a whole field on the ground, where we put black boards and painted the floor, so instead of a painting on the wall it was a painting on the floor. The idea was that the floor also becomes interesting, you can walk on a painting, and walk on lines. In a way it's similar to our recent installation in one of the gardens of the Villa Medici, although that was more volumetric whereas the AA room was more flat. And then, for the Russian Avantgarde show at the Guggenheim, we couldn't do all the pieces we designed but it was very important to explore how you can occupy the ramps and the void and how you also interpret that entire exhibition in a way which exposes the works differently. What is interesting is that you test ideas about how you can install art or objects, how you can connect them through a theme, but also, you can take some of the ideas which you're interested in as a project and try to test them on something like a scaled model. They're not literally trial projects, but obviously they connect to what you are working on at the time. For instance, at the Hayward, for the Fashion show, we also tried to combine a few things: the idea of the field, seeing things from different terraces which works well at the Hayward because it is similar in the sense that you see things in strange adjacencies. It is also comparable to doing a book: the project itself becomes a product on its own. It's the same with installations, where, at that moment, you connect these pieces in this particular way.



HUO: In terms of the history of exhibition design, there was a very strong momentum at the beginning of the century: for instance, I recently went back to a text by Erich Buchholz, the German Constructivist, who made his art become part of the walls, the walls part of the space, the furniture,... and little by little it became this idea that one would enter the installation as a kind of third space, no longer art or architecture. This was in the twenties, and he said he was very influenced by Mondrian and by van Doesburg when he started to transform his apartment.



ZH: Oh, that's interesting, because in Mondrian's studio in New York everything is by Mondrian, but it was not designed as an installation but as a complete environment. But also the whole issue was that people used every possible moment to actually expose another idea. There was a lot of interest in using every facility to test and make immediate some of the discourse which was taking place. Exhibitions are actually the most immediate way to test some of these ideas as an environment. Of course, there was also at the time the importance of many exhibitions between art/architecture and lifestyle, on how we would live in the future, how we would work. There was a tremendous preoccupation with future existence, which was eradicated after a period of time because the future was always seen as rather grim. But I suppose it also relates to all the World Expos, where there were many environments designed to expose ideas of transportation, related to industry, so there were different forms of installations, let's say, or exposing life in a contained space. And I guess later people became much more blase', because they thought they knew everything: they travel and they see things, so there is no need to be confronted with this stuff anymore.



HUO: In other word, the Laboratory years' are over. In Power of Display, the book about MoMA, Staniszewski says that at the beginning Alfred Barr saw MoMA as a laboratory for exhibition design, Philip Johnson did some incredible exhibition designs there, which were in turn influenced by Duchamp, the Bauhaus, Mies, Lily Reich, etc. These laboratory years came to an end in the seventies. Moma declared the Laboratory years to be over and things became more rigid and conventional.



ZH: Yes I hate to say this, but in many museums the curators have very particular views on how art should be displayed. For instance, the only reason we did what we did at the Guggenheim in 1992, was because the time was very tight: we got away with it because there was no time to change things so much. But the (ruling)idea is that you can only see art in an absolute moment of silence; that you have one painting here, one painting there, one object there... And that clustering or compactness was really unheard of in the art scene in terms of painting. But these suprematist paintings were never intended to be exposed isolated in the white cube, they werepart of a field or 'cosmos'. This is another thing which I think is a test of a particular environment, because most of those are interior conditions, and through that you can challenge how people would see things, but also to make an environment that gives you another perception. I think the curatorial wariness stems from the fact that they think that perception is fixed: that there is only one way of perceiving things, not a multiplicity. And they don't see that it doesn't necessarily do harm to the works. I was really shocked by how rigid it is in the museum context to exhibit work.



HUO: Doesn't this have to do with this ideology of "neutral space" which emanates from the ideology of the white cube?



ZH: Variety gives you much more curatorial flexibility. I think that in some installations it could work well to have a minimalist space, but I don't think it works well in every aspect of art installation. The Tate is a good example because there's a real Tate thesis on not only what to have but also how to install art. It works well inside their spaces, but I don't think it does justice to many of the works because you see everything in exactly the same way, and I don't think it works particularly well for painting.



HUO: And if you take the example of Gilbert and George, they conceive of their own exhibition more like a chapel, the installation is skying, so it has to do with difference, no?



ZH: Yes, difference, exactly. And it's also affect. I mean you want to see an exhibition, otherwise you could just look at a book. First of all you have the impact of an environment on you, but also how it makes you look at a particular work in a particular way. An example would be the 1992 exhibition at the Guggenheim, where we did the 5 x 5 room which displayed all the works by Popova and Rodchenko on plexi walls, so you see them also as a space of differences. We tried to install all the Russian Constructivists almost as they were done at the time, but in different ways since they were done in different galleries, and we tried to show the journey from the paintings, through the reliefs exploring the ìculture of materials' to the sculptures and spatial installations.



With respect to the '5x5' show of paintings I thought that we had to paint a wall black at the end of the space, because I didn't think the Rodtchenkos black on black paintings could be seen well on a white background, which would diminish them. But that idea took hours of negotiations and yet it worked extremely well for two reasons: first, it pulls you to the end of the space, but also when you come to the end of the space, you finally start to differentiate the subtle nuances. And also, I think it's like film, not identical with real life: it is a strange moment of life. Because people always think that normative existence is an absolute, and hence this embedding works in a kind of minimalist space, since that is seen as the most normative, puritanical space. But what is extracted from it is the severity and authority it has, which I don't think is normative, which should not be part of normal existence. So what I think is interesting about exhibitions is that they give a momentary take on something. And also that you can have the same show installed in many different ways with as many different takes: there isn't this idea of a singular vision about how these things could be shown.



HUO: It's also interesting to bring in the viewer, because, to some extent, what is first visible in your drawings is a real freedom of the viewer. And that relates back to the laboratory years, because at the beginning of modern museums, there was an idea that the viewer could move freely, in a non-linear way.



ZH: Well, I suppose that part of the reason is that, in the early years, the work which was shown was still in the making. And then there was a moment when it was felt that Modern art was done, when Modernist painting, as a period, was conclusive and finished. Thereby, they became very precious, and this preciousness allowed for an incredible constipation in the way they are perceived: they are very important pieces, they should not be adjacent to someone else, you should see them in one way,... And thus museums really became institutions, very dogmatic institutions. It was the end of the idea of the laboratory, of experimenting.



HUO: In your exhibitions and museums projects, there is obviously a connection to this modern laboratory, so how do you see repetition and also difference?



ZH: Well, when we did the early, very strange projections, people took them to be pictorial or visual representations, but what it did was to challenge people's perception of how to present architecture, in what mode, but also how your eye travels on the wall, because there wasn't necessarily one point or corner view. This led to the idea that there isn't a singular view, there isnít a singular corner, there is a multiplicity of views. And it implied a kind of organic organisation which is not a closed system. The most important thing for me is that these systems are no longer about completeness, they are incomplete compositions, and also not closed systems of organisation. All of this has to do with porosity in organisation: the idea of absolute space shifted to the idea of different adjacencies where you can see things more than once. I've always found this very interesting and intriguing because you can never see the same thing in the same way. You know that when you see an exhibition a few times: every time you go, you see something differently. And what is interesting about installations is that they channel that view, each one has a take on the way you perceive that object or that piece.



HUO: But is intensity, or as you mentioned it: compactness, a condition for that?



ZH: Well, I think that for instance you can move from a room with one piece to a room which has a hundred pieces, there isn't a singular layout. For example, when we did the Hayward show, the Hayward detested the idea of field on the ground, but also there was a problem because all the objects had to be sealed off from light and air, so that essentially you don't see them at first, you only see them when you're very close to them, so there is an element of surprise. And also, you have to move through the objects themselves, so you move inside it and therefore it's no longer just about an object which you see that way, but about trying to occupy it as you move through it. The show becomes a new spatial experience, but of course we were interested at the time in the pixelated field: through repetition, you organise a space which has fluidity. One interesting thing about museum spaces, or display, is that you might use standard items but whether you organise them together in clusters, or fragments, or one field, you connect them differently. And this kind of organisation could also apply to a larger territory, like a big terrain or museum. So the interesting thing about installation is that you can take an idea and test it in different ways, and it could then have a ricochet effect on its neighbouring conditions, the next side, the next room..



HUO: Cross-fertilisation, cross-contamination...



ZH: Exactly. And the Hayward is relatively neutral, but not totally. They try very hard to make it neutral, with white walls, rooms made into cellular spaces, where you move from one cell to the next cell. It's very strange. I think all of this relates to the galleries which were occupying warehouse buildings which were converted into these neutral spaces. They work O.K. when there are two or three rooms, but when you translate them into a space which has fifty rooms, it becomes totally monotonous. And that would be O.K. if it were ultra-monotony, but as it is slightly monotonous, I find it utterly irritating. But I'm sure you could do something with it, it could be challenged. For instance, when we occupied the ramp at the Guggenheim, we put zigzag panels and what was interesting is that it pushed people to the edge as they moved through the space, and it made this particular part of the ramp very narrow, and apparently, I only discovered this later, in some early studies, Frank Lloyd Wright had done provisions on how to occupy the ramp, which have never been used. The ramp was never seen as a space which only occupies the niches. So It is interesting how actually the idea of the temporary occupation of these spaces could also lead to other ideas. For example the idea that you can actually exist on the ramp condition: the incline becomes an interesting terrain to occupy permanently, because you can deal with it, and also because, as a level, you can always see something from below, from above.



HUO: You and I first met over the phone when I was with Rem Koolhaas, thinking about his exhibition design for Cities on the Move at the Hayward Gallery. When Rem called you spontaneously and suggested to recycle your previous exhibition design, something which happens rarely as usually exhibition designs come and go, there is tabula rasa thing, no traces.



ZH: Yes, I agree. In all museums, if they do an elaborate installation, it's not precious enough for them to keep, so they chop it up and throw it away. They could be recycled, or re-used. Even if a person doesn't like it, it doesn't really matter, what is more interesting is how other people combine it, and how a show could be different with these combinations. For example, the Guggenheim always has these shows in the central space, where they have the artist do a piece, and Thomas Krens has kept them all, or many of them, and these have resurfaced as big objects in Bilbao. But it was obvious that they

had been done for the New York Guggenheim rotunda because they were obviously cruder, rougher than the normal things which these guys do. So it would have been nice if they had been combined in a kind of territory of all these objects, since they are all related to this idea of the rotunda: some of them were hung above, some are big pieces, like the Flavin piece. This piece was stunning in the Guggenheim, because it was supposed to come up to this level, suspended from the ceiling, because of the psychological impact it has on you, that it might fall on you, they dropped it to here, and everybody thought that it would touch the ground, but it never did. And when you know it doesn't touch the ground, as an installation piece, it is the most interesting thing about it, not because of the element of danger, but because it's precarious. The same with Richard Serra's pieces: what is great about them is not only in their size, but also in their material. And when they were shown in the D.I.A. in New York, the place was so small that they were close to each other, and it was spectacular because they were so tight, and you know they're made of steel. It transformed that space completely, and also the space had an effect on it and that is what is interesting about the installation: that dual effect. But fundamentally, I think you can test some ideas which you can also want to expose, not that you are competing with the art, but I always think there should be more than one take, because, again, there isnít one single view on anything. And the reason, it seems to me, that installation art is so

popular and, at any rate, interesting is because people see it in different ways.



HUO: And how do you see the anxiety of transdisciplinarity? This was something which was very important for the avant-garde, as well as the laboratory years of modern museums.



ZH: Well, I think the misunderstanding is that they think that when architectural designers do a space, it conflicts with the art. I find that incredible, incredibly ridiculous, because how could something distract? O.K, if it's something done very badly... But on the other hand, if you think about major art pieces which are installed outside buildings, public art, or land art, this is not a place where you can define space: you have no take on the pavement, or the landscape you install it in, but there beauty is in inhabiting strange conditions. I once had a great experience with Christo, when I went to the Reichstag wrapping, it was a signal that this idea that the populace does not enjoy strangeness, had been eradicated. There were millions of people singing and dancing there, who had all flocked to see this building wrapped, because that was a strange idea.



HUO: And he actually anticipated the Gehry Bilbao effect.



ZH: Exactly, a few years before. And so it was an extraordinary event, and historically very critical, because people are not just fascinated by the idea of wrapping an object, but how you wrap it, how you make something. And it's a similar intention when you do an installation, because you're looking at two things: the art piece, and the way the space forces you to move in certain ways, which is what I find interesting about it. Many years ago, somebody who was writing about me, said something like "Zaha used to do many exhibitions, like in the AA", as if it was meaningless, but what they don't understand is that that was the only venue, the only place in which you can actually explore and discuss these ideas through these means. So again, installations are interesting because you can test some of these ideas, and also discuss them with others.



HUO: I interviewed Peter Smithson and Cedric Price, who both mentioned the sixties exhibitions which they also thought of as places to test ideas.



ZH: Yes, exactly. But now people think that if you're an architect, you only do particular things, if you're an artist, you do particular things... People are always asking me: "Why are you interested in doing installations?" And I answer: "You know, I'm interested in very different things!". I liked doing the dance piece with Frederic Flamand because I was interested in ideas of movement, and in the seamlessness between objects and costumes.



HUO: And this is another link to the avant-garde, for whom theatre was very critical.



ZH: Yes, and for us it was incredible, because, as usual, there is always a small budget, you have to deal with a stage...



HUO: Where was this presented? Was this your first work with a performance?



ZH: It was first done in Charleroi and then in Paris. Actually, we were approached ten or twelve years ago, by a choreographer named Rosemarie Butcher who also asked us to do piece for dance. It was going to be done at first as a rehearsal, and then we did one piece for her at the Royal Festival Hall which was only based on lines, and that was very interesting because I find choreography very challenging. The whole thing was done with tape, and the lines connected with the lines of the dancers. But we did another piece were we tried to make these topographies like bridges, it was about the metropolis and landscapes, where the dancers could actually wear, or move these pieces as if they were skirts. On the one hand they seemed heavy, but on another, they could seem very light. The question was that of the relationship between the set, the body, and also what they wear and how these things could be totally seamless. For example, in one piece, the whole object was like a net, and all the dancers move through it, and it's really like watching an animation of a wire-frame model. These things are spatially very intriguing, because they can move with you and become distorted. And all of these tests eventually also lead to other things in terms of oneís thinking. And what intrigues me is that other mediums actually have an impact on the work, because itís not something which we are always used to, or familiar with, it advances your general thinking. For instance, many years ago, I was doing a project for a Verner Panton chair: we were supposed to paint them or add things to them, and I was wondering about what would happen if you would take a Verner Panton chair and melted it.

This idea of melting was intriguing: if you stretched it, it could become a chaise, it you pulled it up, it could become a bar stool,... We decided to paint it, but what was interesting about that was that when you stretched it, it eventually implied a space which is very stretched, and also fluid, and when you compressed it, it becomes a very compressed space. That really led to other spatial things which we are doing: this idea of very fluid or compressed spaces, of elastic spaces, so, it went beyond the idea of making a Verner Panton chair, it led to other things. And to go back to installation, what is interesting to me is that you can do them quite quickly, and also, you can test them in so many different ways, materially, and so on.



HUO: And your Vitra work is also related to museum work.



ZH: It is. Vitra, ten years ago, was really the one terrain where they tested so many projects. They haven't done that for a while now, I think the purchasing of the Barragn archives stopped everything for a while.



HUO: Because it took so much time?



ZH: And investment. I had an argument once with Max Protech who sold them the Barragn pieces and I don't want to be misunderstood about this, but I really think that it's a pity that they bought it. Only because I thought that Rolf (Fehlbaum)'s great draw was to commission artists to do projects. I am glad that the Barragn has a home, and I don't want in any way to diminish its importance as an archive, but his role as a client was very important. Because he was also interested in furniture, it started out with commissioning people to do a series of chairs which were not about normal ways of seating. And that role was very critical because the Vitra production campus could become a place for many full scale installations, and weíre hoping it goes back to it.



HUO: Is the firestation a laboratory?



ZH: Yes, when we did the Fire Station, I always thought that the garage could also be used for events, as a performance and events space, and also for exhibitions. It has been used for exhibitions. The difficulty is that they want to touch it but they don't want to touch it, to change the building. And if you don't touch it, you can't really use it as a gallery, you can use it as a raw space, and if you transform it, it might do something... But I always thought that you should really think about something interesting, like making another room inside the room, or a series of ways of installing the objects there, so it gives them a kind of life, a life beyond its life as a fire station. For example, it's very difficult to exhibit furniture, unless you think in advance about how this furniture could be used in different layers. And for furniture, I like it when they put them all on those archival shelves, but I always think they should make a kind of field, because putting a chair on display doesn't work. We have it at the I.C.A., but that was seen as a kind of a way were you can have objects above and on the ground, occupying different layers. About this idea of the podium, and to go back to the example of the Guggenheim, many of the responses to the Guggenheim show were because when they have mobiles on display, they always put underneath them a kind of low podium. I've always thought that was ridiculous: the mobile is there and the podium is here, and so if you donÇt keep an eye on it, you fall on the podium. So that's why, when we did the room with the works of Kobra, we thought of making it into something like a hill, so that it's no longer an object, but a sort of landscape. This way, the landscape almost pops up through the floor, and it becomes like a globe with these objects suspended above it. In turn, that led to the idea that the floor doesn't have to always be flat and devoid of obstacles, that the obstacles are also seamless with the floor, like a landscape.



HUO: So it's basically testing ideas in an exhibition context.



ZH: Yes, testing ideas about how you can occupy spaces, but there is another element which I think is very interesting, which is about an interior urban condition. Many people don't really know how to occupy very large interior spaces, they think: "My God, it's too big!", that's always the comment. But the idea is to invent an interior complexity, like an interior urban condition: you won't have the experience of walking in a city, but it could be as enriching as the urban context of a city. That could really be sucked into an interior, and an installation would be a way to test that these very vast spaces could be occupied in different ways.



HUO: Would this mean that these become more of a performative than an representational space?



ZH: Yes, in the same way that artworks are tests for certain ideas, these installations too could be a test for certain ideas.



HUO: Doesn't this analogy of the exhibition with the city takes us even further away from the tabula rasa idea, since cities have so much to do with feedback loops, cities don't grow from a tabula rasa, they are complex dynamic systems which happen in time.



ZH: I don't think we should try that in exactly the same way, but if one could translate some of these ideas, for example, how you can deal with very large interiors not only as an installation, but also as a different way of occupying the space...

When we did the competition for new Orientation Centre for the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, for example, one space was about many terraces moving gently, so it was not one smooth ground, but many grounds. And the terracing goes with different kinds of modules, which cluster and separate, so the idea is that when you're higher up, you see things looking down, and when you are below, you can see things up. But it's done as part of a system which is a kind of repetition of the same thing, it is about how you can use one module to make a field which is flexible, or permeable, or fluid. And the idea for the Hayward floor was, not taken from there, but based on a similar idea about how you can deal with museum spaces in terms of fields. So you can combine things together in a new working way: it can be seen as a kind of pixelated wall, or a shifted geometry of an exterior wall. But perceptually, I think the most interesting thing is how you would perceive these things.



HUO: And how do you see the Dome, another exhibition design of yours, in this context?



ZH: For the Dome, the whole idea of the mind (zone) was based on how to occupy this very large space as an interior urban landscape, and also the idea of the walls becoming the ceiling, becoming the floor, and vice-versa, was actually to form a seamless installation on all these surfaces and to allow us to use material which could be used for all layers. Originally we wanted to have a much bigger curatorial role on this show, and that's why we insisted on using many of the artists, because we thought that that should not only be a way of looking at the mind in a scientific way, that ideas of perception, ideas of language, of identity, for example, are very critical aspects of what we call mind, as well as interpretations on development. So it should not only be seen through text-book experiments, and a lot of artists now are really dealing with this idea of perceptual quality. You have two conditions for example: the false perspective which diminishes, so it makes the figure bigger or smaller, depending on how you see it. There are moments when it's sitting like this and you see it from the back, in a photograph you really don't realise that it's so big. So there is this idea of scale, and the intention was that you combine the installations with time, for example, we had this ant colony, and they were hiding for the five months, and now the ants have finally come out of their hibernation. They were imbedded in the structure, they wouldn't come out. After five months, I thought they wouldn't come out any more, but a friend of mine went to see it and said that he had taken

his kids, and he said they were totally fascinated by these ants.



HUO: Another thing that struck me when I went back to see it, was the Ryochi Ikeda sound space. It is interesting in terms of exhibition that there is a strong visual primacy. I think the sound and smell of exhibitions are neglected issues.



ZH: These are very interesting phenomena, and not much is focused on it. Another thing which is weird, because you don't expect it, is the issue of scale, in all aspects of architecture. And I think the idea that you can show video only on a straight wall is ridiculous. But there's never a seamless kind of environment. Actually, when I saw the Whitney Biennial in New York, there were some interesting pieces there in the video installations, quite intriguing.



HUO: Could you tell me more about your collaboration with the Pet Shop Boys?



ZH: Yes, that was actually very interesting because, you had to think about the fact that that show had to move to very different theatres: small ones and large ones. And you had to think about them in a system in which they can easily take it all apart in one night, to take everything out, pack it in a truck and move it.



HUO: So that's even faster than an exhibition. It reminds me of Duchamps suitcase museum.



ZH: Yes: every night, they have to install, pack up, and go somewhere else. It has an optimum time, they have to do it within a few hours, they can't take any longer. And most of the time, there was someone else performing the night before. For instance, when we went to the Wembley performance, we had a drink with them backstage, and when we came out, the stage was packed in less than an hour. So you have to conceive of it in this way. And also, what these guys would use to walk up and down into a space had to be simplified because of this whole packing business. And since some of the theatres were very small and some very large, it had to work in both of these kinds of spaces. So we started from the idea of a landscape which can fold on itself, then we thought of it as a kind of big suitcase which comes into pieces, and then the two combined into a kind of landscape which goes into a suitcase to be shipped out. So again, it was about more than one level: there were two or three levels... And it was also that they could sit if they wanted,... It didn't have to be the same routine at each performance: you could go up or down, you could go inside the enclosure,... And like in the dance piece, they had these three special performances, in which they moved a part of the set away, so they had to be big enough to whisk a lot away. So it was like an interactivity between the performance and the object. And it was almost like when, in a drawing, you see something as flat, and little by little it begins to lift up, like an animation ,the question was how to be able to do something like that in real life.



HUO: The Villa Medici piece which you did for our show "Le Jardin, La vill e, la memoire" in Rome is also a performative platform. Dance events will take place during the exhibition.



ZH: Well, the Villa Medici piece was very interesting because it was an outdoor space, a landscape, and because you cannot really touch the ground in Rome, because of the archaeology . So we thought about how we could occupy this whole terrain given that I never saw it as a flat terrain, but always as a whole volume, and obviously not with a ceiling. The idea was how to begin to define the grid: not begin to shoot out from inside, but to kind of connect these buildings down, through these elastic strings which also pulls your view across. And what was really great about it when it was done, because it was an open terrain, the light changes these lines from invisible to visible: the lines flowing through the space.



HUO: Is there the link to your Rome museum?



ZH: In a garden, it flows and it returns, but in the Rome museum, the idea is that they flow and return but they also disarray each other, almost like a new geological condition, but there is never the same repeated moment. And these lines can also make you move through a space as if you're going through a stream, almost as if you canoe into a space, a stream, or many streams, like a delta with many confluents of liquid spaces moving into each other, separating and converging, becoming something else, connecting again,... For instance, what is interesting when you're walking without a particular trajectory, is that you meander into spaces and you discover things unexpectedly. When you go into the wilderness, you don't have a path, or something that tells you that you can only go through this path. And through that, you discover spaces and things which you didnt necessarily intend to. You can get lost sometimes, but these moments focus your view in different ways. For the Rome piece, you had to have an idea that, once you remove the boundary of a particular site, theres no longer a fortified site, but you have to come back to the city and really reinvent these event-spaces. The intention was to really make these event-spaces into a field. So there is an equal importance of the space which is the occupied gallery space, which is enclosed into the open field: it is not made of just one space, it is made of many pockets which create an event-field.

The idea in the Villa Medici piece is that these lines push you to meander through this field, and because you are moving around them, you have a different journey than if you had crossed it like that. And it also forces you to view the space in different ways: normatively, you just walk in and you see that and you walk out, but this makes you perceive things differently because of the way youre standing. People talk about the importance or non-importance of geometry, but geometry forces you to face things in particular ways: you are not always aware of the way your body actually rests against a wall, and such things. People always talk about how nice it is to go to the park, thats because youre not forced in this particular way, but people dont analyse it that way.



HUO: The last question, which I ask in all interviews, is about unrealised projects: what is your favourite unrealised project or unbuilt work?



ZH: It changes from time to time. We have a lot of unrealised projects, a plethora of them... What is difficult is that when something is not realised and you look back at it, you would change certain things. I suppose there are aspects of certain works which have never reoccurred, the Peak, for example: this idea that a public space no longer exists as a confined space here, but is suspended above: To shift the idea of a normative civic space, and the importance of the void for us really started with that project, and eventually it became very important, as important as the occupied mass. Dusseldorf, for instance, is very interesting in terms of adjacency: you have an office building which is like that, and you see your neighbours but you can't touch them because you are separated by air. And what was intriguing in some of our recent work, like in the Reina Sofia, was to give the building a space which they could never have had because of the linear organisation of the hospital. And also how it operates when all the levels are different, so you are slightly, not confused, but lost in this space, but also you can actually place yourself because of all the circulation which is always going through it. The whole organisation of the museum is so linear, but they dont like it, so they make walls throughout the space. But here, because its so narrow, you cant have a corridor, its nonsense space, so the question is how to occupy this kind of left-over land in this incredible place in Madrid. About another project, in Cardiff, the idea of the artificial terrain was also very interesting: what it would really be like to be standing not only inside the opera house, but also under these enormous rehearsal rooms which are clustered above you as if they are in another world. And also to test ideas about acoustics in a opera house, to see how and if symmetry really works acoustically. But there should be a show of all of this, because of all the great projects which weve done for all these cities, and which were never realised...*



HUO: That was the idea: to do an exhibition on the unbuilt roads, the roads not taken.



ZH: That sounds great, Ive always thought it could make a great show. Because we wanted to do a show years ago at MoCA in L.A., and I didnt really want to do a show that would just show for every project, the sketches, line drawings, and models - that would be very boring. Instead I thought it would be more interesting to show an aspect of each project: you could do a space where it could relate to an interior but you exhibit drawings on it, it doesnt have to relate to the project; you can do a wall of only one particular study,... We had an argument about it with Liz Smith, the curator there at the time, because she didnt believe in this idea because she had a problem with me ideologically. And I said "How can you have an ideological problem with me about my own stuff?" But she didnt think it should be an installation piece. But I thought there was one room that was big enough to do only two projects, for instance the Peak as a horizontal skyscraper, and the tower of New York which is a vertical one so you connect different conditions, because theyre also about ten years apart.

When you do your own show, you see things at the same time, but they also have different proximities. And finally you see things which you never thought related to each other, but just because of curatorial coincidence, they exist in a proximate space.



HUO: So the exhibition performs a distortion of space and time.



ZH: Yes, and you can connect things which youve never placed in your mind at the same time.



HUO: That would mean that exhibitions are always in the present.



ZH: They are. And if theyre done well, and apart from the beauty of the object, there has to be another element, you have to think about what the ultimate agenda is. People are always reluctant to actually have the final push, what is the ultimate element at that particular moment. What they dont understand is that this is only ones take at that particular moment in time. You might do the same show ten tears later, or five, or three years later, with the same material, and you would do it differently, thats whats exciting about it. You carry some things with you, and some things you shed, some things you bring

back,... In all fields, theatre, museum,... everybody has become so entrenched in their own position, there are all these people operating in the background who always say "Its impossible to do this because we cant do it in the theatre, on the stage, in a museum". And thats very weird: the theatre is an incredible space, where things also have to do with sound and movement. Its incredible that these different elements are always supposed to occur in a confined space, which is always viewed frontally. In the Cardiff project we faced resistance against our asymetric design of both the stage and the auditorium.



It was claimed that the singers do not want to sing and perform on a stage which has no symmetry. Its an extrordinary thing. I was myself on a stage for AIDA, giving a talk on architecture, which was bizarre enough, and I could see nothing, nobody, it was total blankness, the reverse of giving a speech, where you have to see the audience. But you obviously sense the space, the parameters of the space. So its very curious to think that someone who has supposed to have incredible creartive talent is supposedly scared of asymetry or any spatial feature that might influence their performance.



HUO: Many cultural institutions have these defensive moments of being scared, and I wonder if its not what Julia Kristeva calls "a fear of transdisciplinarity".



ZH: Its definitely a fear. One fundamental problem is that its very difficult for them to be challenged about their positions. Thats the fundamental problem: if youre challenged you have to readjust your views. I find that the most challenging thing, and thats the reason why people do different things, travel, see different worlds, do experiments,... You need to understand that there are other situations, which are equally valid, and that teaches you something. The sense of displacement can be very liberating, because there isnt one particular way of how your behaviour should be. People don't like that, they always try to make of you what they think normal people are, and those people dont like to be challenged. Its very strange, somebody will come to you and say "This is a sharp corner, Im going to fall over it." And you can say "Feel it!" In my house, for instance, there is all this very sharp-cornered furniture, and once friends of mine came with their children, and I was petrified because they were this big and the table came up to here. But these kids were running around like in a park and it was amazing, because they were very smart: three years old, running around, and when they came to a corner, they just went around it. Because they had no fear, of course there could have been a accident, but none of them fell. And I was really intrigued by that, and I thought "Goodness, adults have been so imbedded into one way of existence." And that has to be continuously challenged and changed!