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Opera House Lottery: Zaha Hadid and the Cardiff Bay Project by
Nicholas Crickhowell University of Wales Press(available through
Paul & Co., Concord, Mass.) 170pp. $34.50
(Courtesy Zaha Hadid)
| A new book details the cynical machinations that deprived Wales
of its own Guggenheim Bilbao. by Raymund Ryan In September 1994, Zaha Hadid won an international competition to design a new opera house for Cardiff, the capital of Wales. A star of MOMA's Deconstructivist Architecture show in 1988, the Iraqi-born, London-based Hadid was a favorite of critics and students worldwide, mainly thanks to her brilliant and provocative drawings and models. But until this breakthrough in Cardiff, Hadid's only major construction had been a dynamic fire station for the Vitra factory complex in Germany. Cardiff was to be her masterpiece, and, for the people of Wales, a focus of contemporary cultural pride. Tragically for both Hadid and the Welsh, the project was ultimately axed. Nicholas, Lord Crickhowell's Opera House Lottery tells the complex story of how Hadid and Wales were cheated of this remarkable prize. It's not unusual, of course, for an architect's dreams to be shattered, or for a city or nation to reject a powerful urban vision. What is unusual is to have insider access to the process. And it must be unique for the insider to be a British Conservative arguing in support of the avant-garde. With subtle but evident indignation, Lord Crickhowell describes the myriad procedural obstacles that Hadid's scheme had to negotiate before finally succumbing to "the disaster that was to destroy us"--"us" because Crickhowell was chairman of the Opera House Trust during this debacle, and (as Thatcher's minister in charge of Wales) had previously set the Cardiff Bay Development Corporation in motion. Opera House Lottery offers an exposé of the machinations of all those who brought the project down: plodding bureaucrats, weak local media, rival architects (Manfredi Nicoletti, Norman Foster), and mediocre or uninterested politicians (Conservative ministers Michael Heseltine, John Redwood, and Virginia Bottomley). For Wales, the promise of Hadid's opera house was twofold: It would capitalize on the widely recognized excellence of the Welsh National Opera (WNO), and it would serve as a visible symbol of urban progress and renovation in Cardiff Bay, the city's increasingly disused port area. The Welsh wanted something similar to the Guggenheim Bilbao, a project in which architecture and culture would combine to both stir a city from its postindustrial slumber and challenge the dominance of the centralized state. In late 1994, Cardiff seemed poised to spring onto the global stage. Instead, it stumbled and fell rather badly. Hadid's proposal--a scheme involving glazed horizontal shards above a topography of ramps and terraces (which she described as "jewels in a crystal necklace")--was a sophisticated and elegant design with a considerable urban presence. But problems began early on, when the Opera House Trust decided to reassess its jury's choice, reexamining Hadid's winning entry next to those of Foster and Itsuko Hasegawa (after some confusion, the runners-up) and that of Nicoletti, a wild card from Rome (whose presence is insufficiently explained in Crickhowell's book). The reappearance of these architects seems to have muddied the waters, slowing the momentum of Hadid's project. (Crickhowell--obliquely referring, it seems, to issues of personal conduct--suggests that Foster "somehow on this occasion . . . was not at his best.") Having survived this challenge--and won over some of those in the local government and press who were calling the project "elitist"--Hadid's team had to persuade the Millennium Commission, a government agency that distributes earnings from the national lottery. All seemed to be going well until the commission's vote, when the unpopular Conservative government's fear of controversy (some Labour politicians were still wielding the elitism charge) appears to have led to the scheme's defeat. After that, equivalent Millennium Commission funds were awarded to a hastily designed populist alternative: a new rugby stadium. Meanwhile, another competition was held for a cultural center (to house the WNO, among other things) on the Cardiff Bay site, and was won by a much inferior design submitted by Hadid's onetime Welsh collaborator. A consummate Establishment figure, Crickhowell writes in an understated but canny British way: "I held the old-fashioned view that Zaha Hadid, having won a major competition, was entitled to be treated fairly." He scorns the accusations of elitism, but does admit that the use of the term "opera house" was a tactical error--the building would also have been "a multipurpose lyric theatre." Although he pays only a modicum of attention to the visual and urbanistic strengths of Hadid's design, he convincingly describes his growing affinity for her "challenging and imaginative experiment," as opposed to "those agreeable fantasies with which the populists beguile us, and of which those translucent impressions of the so-called Glass Wave of Manfredi Nicoletti are perfect examples." He is a cultured layman turning on to contemporary architecture and growing ever more impatient with the philistines and their lack of interest in fair play (although he never successfully explains the legal implications of winning and then being stripped of such a commission). When the project was finally rejected, he writes, he "felt physically sick." Hadid was more sanguine: "It's a bummer." In the earliest days of the Cardiff project, an arts consultant had called attention to the terrible political difficulties encountered in the 1980s by Carlos Orr's design for the Opéra de la Bastille in Paris. "We had been warned," Crickhowell writes. Now, so have those cities, architects, and cultural enthusiasts with ambitions similar to Cardiff's and Hadid's. Raymund Ryan is an architect and writer based in Dublin. |
Keywords:
Cardiff Opera House, Hadid, books
