No defence for Hadid's Sackler design

I have been enjoying the fruits of Peter Cook’s magpie mind for the best part of four decades, ever since I first saw him talking about Archigram in Brighton in 1971. His inquisitive mind offers an endless stream of thought about how architecture might be, of the possibilities for architecture, excluding nothing. His thinking offers a genuine alternative to the repetitive morphology and facadism that has dominated so many published buildings in recent years (and why doesn’t BD mix up its reviewers sometimes?).

Regrettably, however, I cannot agree with his defence of Zaha Hadid’s new Sackler Gallery extension in Hyde Park. Ellis Woodman, with his B-movie dialogue, may have fallen into the same trap as Zaha in her new building — that of melodrama — but the building should not be lauded.

The question I have is to what extent Zaha herself really focused on the design? Its failure, in my view, is in the detailed design development of what is a fairly straightforward solution to its parkland setting — a building pretending to be a tent. To bring that off requires a lightness of touch lacking in the final product.

Zaha does not need Cook to defend her (nice of him to make the effort, though) nor does she need to overly concern herself with Woodman’s rhetoric. She has achieved an extraordinary amount and, even if she has ignored the lesson from Erich Mendelsohn that an organic (or, as ZHA would have it, a parametric) approach to form-making can often be a cul-de-sac, she has had some spectacular successes on the way, and they keep on coming — for example, the new Baku project.

Alan Power
London W11