If any landscape were ripe for Zaha Hadid, it’s the Alps. The very surface of
the earth here – all angles and diagonals, peaks and troughs and shattered
geometries, the eye yanked this way and that by views and vertigo – feels
tailormade for her melodramatic architecture, a stage set thrown up by
geological forces for Hadid to strut across. And the architectural theatre
she has created on it? The Nordpark Cable Railway, Innsbruck – Europe’s
first designer railway, no less – ripping over the Austrian Alps like a
rollercoaster.
It’s not a cranking, 19th-century kind of railway, of course – you’d never
expect anything so Stone Age from Hadid – but something stridently
21st-century, fit for this new golden age of train travel, as, tomorrow, the
first Eurostar trains pull out of St Pancras. Glamour, speed and
eco-friendliness beckon, as air travel becomes ever more pedestrian,
sluggish and carbon guilt-ridden.
Hadid’s architecture is made for movement. It’s rocket-fuel stuff. She rips to
shreds the old, static rules of space – walls, ceilings, front and back,
right angles, the single viewpoint of Renaissance perspective – and
reassembles them as “a new fluid, kind of spatiality”. She speeds up and
contorts your experience of the space around you, to better encapsulate, she
says, the pace of modern life. Short of creating actual forms that morph and
change shape (still the stuff of science fiction), Hadid creates the solid
apparatus that makes us perceive space as morphing and changing shape around
us as we pass through it, an artificial landscape that seems to take off.
Eight years ago in Innsbruck, she designed a building that looked as if it
almost could. Her Bergisel ski-jump, a spiralling ribbon of concrete,
freeze-framed the elegant, pirouetting leap of the man from the Milk Tray
advert. Now, across the valley on the south-facing slopes of Nordkette
mountain she has created its foil, a railway line rising up from the city
into the mountain’s lower slopes.
The Nordpark Railway, to open on December 1, isn’t so much about getting from
A to B – vital though this is for the inhabitants of Innsbruck’s northern
suburbs. It’s part of that old-fashioned Alpine tradition the scenic
railway, in which the experience of the movement, the incredible views, the
thrill of the ride, are as important as reaching your destination. With a
keen eye on the Alps’ economic future once climate change really kicks in,
Innsbruck’s city fathers decided to commission the railway, in partnership
with a private company called Strabag, not just to get locals and tourists
up to the ski slopes, or, in its ever lengthening summer, the hiking and
biking trails, but as a year-round thrill in itself.
And thrill is definitely the word. The slender funicular railway emerges from
Innsbruck’s chocolate-box downtown, leaps across the river and shoots up the
mountain on delicate stilts at a vertiginous angle, up to 42 degrees,
opening up an astonishing snow-topped Alpine panorama – a view, though, now
almost matched by the artificial landscape Hadid has created to frame it.
“From city shops to mountain tops in 25 minutes – mountains have never been
so close,” is the railway’s proud boast.
Hadid’s four stations are astonishing experiences in themselves, much like the
great stations at the birth of railways. For the Victorians, the aesthetic,
sensual effects of arriving and departing, the quality of the experience,
were almost as important as the functional challenges of engineering that
really drove railway architecture.
For Hadid, though, they are more important. Progress in architecture and
engineering today is driven by aesthetics more than functional requirements:
the form, indeed, has become the function. These stations look like crystal
palaces for the Snow Queen, vortices of snowflakes whipped up by the very
motion of the trains passing through, and frozen by royal command in
mid-air. “The metaphor of the frozen fluid was what immediately came to
mind,” says Thomas Vietzke, the project architect. “We studied the shapes of
glaciers and moraines. We wanted the stations to appear like carved ice in
the landscape, like a frozen stream falling down the slopes.” Hadid’s office
has not disclosed the cost of the project.
Hadid emerged in the late 1970s as one of a precocious generation at the
Architectural Association in London – Rem Koolhaas, Daniel Libeskind et al –
who eschewed the postmodern backlash by becoming more modernist still:
supermodernist. For Hadid this meant directing eyes back to what made
Modernism exciting in the first place. This was that period around the First
World War, when Futurist and Suprematist artists were still high on the
novel joys of modernity – unprecedented speed, thrilling disjunctions, the
capacity of the new mechanical beasts of air and land to reshape our
landscape and our experience of landscape – but not yet too horrified by its
brutality. They dreamt of new art and new architectures to encapsulate
speed. As the Suprematist Kasimir Malevich wrote: “We can only perceive
space when we break free from the earth, when the point of support
disappears.” None of these ideas were actually built – until Hadid came
along.
Compare Hadid’s ski-jump with the stations and you can see the aesthetic
development her office has made in less than a decade. In the late 1990s,
when Innsbruck first commissioned her, she was still under the cloud of the
Cardiff Bay Opera House debacle, when her melodramatic drawings were thought
impossible or uneconomical to build. She proved them wrong. Work such as the
ski-jump, the Cincinnati Art Centre, the BMW factory in Leipzig and the
science centre in Wolfsburg, has been all about backing up her dazzling
designs with solid engineering. Nordpark, though, unveils for the first time
the new direction in which her designs are moving: in material, from one
fluid-turned-solid – concrete – to another – glass; in shape, from the
jagged angles, lines and floating, intersecting volumes of shapes inspired
by the early Modernists, towards sensuous Dalì-esque curves, shaped for the
age of digital space, where the impeccable quality of the surface, the skin,
counts more than the bone structure.
It’s typical of Hadid’s restlessness that as soon as she has mastered one
aesthetic she’s off to the next, one even more fiendishly complex to
realise. To copy the curves of nature requires untold number-crunching, as
Brunelleschi discovered when creating the dome for the Duomo in Florence, or
Jorn Utzon with the Sydney Opera House, the first building in the world
significantly designed with the aid of a computer.
Modern computer-aided design – here car-design programmes – mean that ever
more complex curves can be designed. Every inch of Nordpark’s stations drip
and curl in a different direction. The greatest challenge of all, though, is
actually creating in three real dimensions the seamless, airbrushed, digital
skin in Hadid’s imagination. On a steel bone structure are hung moulded,
white toughened glass panels, each one unique. You can see the ultimate
object of Hadid’s gaze: the uninterrupted skin of an aerodynamic plane, boat
or car.
She isn’t there yet. The stations are shiny, liquid, but get too close and the
imperfections glower, like the first scratch on an iPod, a stain on an
all-white carpet. The panels are warped with unintended curves unavoidable
in such massive, curved glass sheets, so that where they meet each other
ugly junctions clash. Such is the price of progress.
Hadid has set herself an incredible aesthetic challenge. In years to come the
systems that roll fluid-shaped cars, kettles and aircraft off production
lines will, with enough investment, doubtless reach architecture. For now,
though, we’ll have to make do with work in progress towards the future
of globalised architecture, as envisaged by this most ambitious of
architects – a building of impossible curves, designed in London by an Iraqi
architect, manufactured in China, and assembled in Austria.
Ride Hadid’s railway
Innsbruck - Hungerburg:
Adult single €3.40, return €5.60
Senior/teen single €2.70, return €2.80
Child single €1.70, return €4.50
From Hungerburg passengers can transfer to a cable car to reach the summit of
the Hafelekar mountain (2,335m).
