Zaha's in NY Gug (... és grande mãezinha, és... enorme!)

"Not all critics have been smitted with Hadid. In a review of the exhibition posted at Slate.com June 21, 2006, Witold Rybczynski observes that "The paintings—and there are many—are cartoonish, like frames from a sci-fi comic strip."
"Despite their presentation and surroundings," Mr. Rybcyznski continued, "it's hard to take them seriously as art, so perhaps they are merely a testimony to the architecture. The beautifully crafted models, in wood, metal, and glass, have the self-sufficiency of abstract sculptures, pure undiluted form. After the exquisite models, mundane reality intrudes: In the photographs of the actual buildings, the geometrical shapes turn into windows, with sills, and sashes, and caulking; pristine geometry is interrupted by metal handrails; the smooth concrete cracks. The impression is of idealized forms left out in the rain, to paraphrase a remark of Frank Lloyd Wright's to Philip Johnson....Hadid's taste for retro fashion was evident in her first project, The Peak, which is appropriately accorded its own room at the very beginning of the exhibit. Designed in 1982, The Peak is a hotel on a dramatic mountainside overlooking Hong Kong. Although the competition-winning scheme was never built, it brought Hadid international recognition. In hindsight, it looks pretty tame, a revival of Russian Suprematism combined with the 1950s googly architecture of Miami Beach, Fla., and Wildwood, N.J. Next to the model and drawings of the building (unlabeled, like everything else in the show, so it's impossible to understand how the building actually functions) are two examples of seating designed by the architect in 1985-86. What is striking is the extent to which the forms of the building and the furniture are interchangeable....Walter Gropius once said that an architect should be able to design a city or a teacup. Whatever the merits of such a dubious claim, even Gropius wouldn't have suggested that teacups and cities were interchangeable. In Zaha's world, they are."

Link, via Formiga