Interview by Costanza Madricardo
ARUM – Venice Biennale 2012
For the 13th Architecture Biennale exhibition “Common Ground”, Zaha Hadid and Patrick Schumacher present a series of models which are exploring the potential of tensil and shell structures.
This research takes as a starting point the work of masters like Felix Candela and Heinz Isle. Its future structural design is then developed through the studies of the researcher Philip Block together with Hadid’s students from the University of applied Arts in Vienna. The pleated metal structure in the middle of the exhibition hall in the Arsenale is then installed as a tribute to the German architect Frei Otto and serves as a point of connection between the future and the past of computational design applied
to tensil structures.