The Zaha Hadid Architektur exhibition at MAK presented a major retrospective of our work, bringing together many architectural models from different design stages, photographs, sketches, drawing, renderings, computer animations and paintings – many of the latter appearing in pubic for the first time.
Created especially for MAK, our Ice Storm installation constituted a built manifesto, exploring the potential for a new domestic language in architecture, driven by state-of-the-art digital design and manufacturing technologies. Suggestive rather than definitive in intention, Ice Storm presents a latent environment in which neither familiar typographies or codes of conduct are embedded.
The installation contained a series of previously designed ZHA furniture elements and installations: Glacier, Moraine, Stalactite, Stalagmite, Iceberg, Z-Play and Domestic Wave – all ‘morphed’ to become seamless elements within Ice Storm, alongside two newly created hard sofas.
Readable as an ‘apartment’ carved from a single continuous mass, Ice Storm’s rhythm of folds, niches, recesses and protrusions follows a willful formal logic, articulating a design language which emphasizes complex curvilinearity, seamlessness and the smooth transition between otherwise disparate elements.
Ice Storm invites visitors to occupy its mass and voids, to explore for themselves this new open aesthetic – to reinvent ourselves in terms of posture, demeanor and lifestyle.