Zaha Hadid's Mobile Art for Chanel

Several theories on this bizarre episode of cultural patronage, which cost about one million Euros, have been circulating in the French press in recent days but one word keeps cropping up—U.F.O. (OVNI in French)—to describe the pavilion-gadget designed and built by archistar Zaha Hadid for Chanel. Looking as if it was lifted straight off the cover of a sci-fi magazine and by no means new to those in the know, her mobile-art creature has landed in the square in front of Jean Nouvel's very first and perhaps most famous Parisian building, the Arab World Institute. It brings with it a happy ending and a standard official script that fills Dominique Baudis, AWI director, with joy, as the global financial recession has gifted it with a 600m2 space designed by an Anglo-Iraqui architect and the first woman to win the Pritzker Prize in 2004. A forced landing for this flying saucer—a clear Hadid design albeit slightly lower key than we have come to expect—that embarked on its itinerant and nomadic existence in 2008.

A great admirer of the anti- and post-Bauhaus content of Zaha Hadid's design, when Karl Lagerfeld, artistic director of Maison Chanel, decided to celebrate the brand's legendary and iconic Matelasse bag he commissioned her to design a mobile pavilion to showcase the very best of contemporary art, selected and presented in a futuristic fiction story devised by Fabrice Bousteau, director of Beaux-Arts magazine. Unfortunately, the fruit of these art-fashion-architecture close encounters of the highest level ran aground after its first two diplomatic trips, to New York and Hong-Kong, and was at risk of rusting away in a Malakoff depot. Now, after resolving problems posed by the fact that it rests on an auditorium, this 180-ton sinuous and curvilinear "futuristic mussel" will permanently replace the horrendous tent-market-tearoom inherited from Paris's Algerian celebrations.

A fairytale with a happy ending—as stressed in unison by all those involved at the opening evening—that will provide the city with an additional structure and, until October, an exhibition on some of Zaha Hadid's recent designs. Nor will there be any fuelling of arguments big or small as Jean Nouvel's office has already expressed its appreciation of this jolie sculpture… No, this design object can only split the fans and denigrators of Zaha Hadid, now a familiar name in Italy after she built the Maxxi museum in Rome.

Thus far, reality and communication have changed the public's view of Hadid's work, multiplied exponentially in this overdose of corporate-communication rehabilitation strategies. Object, architecture and exhibition become tautology, spawning a Matryoshka-effect that makes the fact that the pavilion hosts an exhibition on recent research programmes conducted by Zaha Hadid's office almost hilarious.

What we have is a dumbed down interpretation of the three levels of experience. First, the mobile art's discovery-presentation but, as we were saying, Paris has inherited it because the world's economy stopped it dead in its tracks. Then its setting, which metaphorically becomes the most sophisticated mise-en-scène of this failure in which even the magnificent numerical model that is the Zaha Hadid office trademark loses its contextual parameters.

There is something wrong with this display. It has lost the urban-scale interpretation of the architect's splendid and more successful creations, with the four video shows doing little to help. The reinvention of the tower concept, for instance—from those already built (the Marseille Tour CMA CGM) to those at the design phase (e.g. Beijing and Dubai)—seems diminished by an all-over effect that becomes a celebration of the ephemeral with a hi-tech content. In the exhibition, silver painting and reliefs overshadow the quality and sociology—sacrificed to evocation and pure decoration— that are the true purpose of her quality architecture. Basically, they seem—and the communication does not work in their favour—to have built an exhibition that downgrades Hadid's outstanding research to a mere accessory. It all appears to centre on the passage of ownership of a cheeky and brand-new showroom. This city possesses an urban fabric that is little open to true architectural accomplishments but filled with leftover pavilions and stuffed with architecture that was meant to remain ephemeral. Now, this gift-design offers a chance to grasp and communicate architecture. This mobile art will bear metaphorical testimony to the near-total halt in construction and imminent dissolution of pointless buildings as a perverse effect of a global financial recession.
Ivo Bonacorsi