My daily struggle is to understand what is important, to my situation, in the constant barrage of information on the Internet. What can and should be ignored? Is my purpose to seek distraction, novelty and entertainment? Or is the goal and purpose to my Net Surfing to gain valuable knowledge? What do I hope to accomplish?
“There are things that attract human attention, and there is often a huge gap between what is important and what is attractive and interesting."
- Yuval Noah Harari
And Donald Trump has not helped make being informed easy with all his mixed messages.
“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.”
When
the news broke Thursday that the architect Zaha Hadid had died of a
heart attack, at 65, while being treated for bronchitis in a Miami
hospital, the American Institute of Architects offered up, via Twitter,
what it presumably meant as a compliment: “Rest in peace Zaha Hadid; you
were a ground-breaking female architect.” Hadid, the first woman to win
the Pritzker Prize, and one of the great creative forces in
architecture of our time, would surely have recoiled at the notion of
connecting her success to her gender.
She spent most of her career trying to get beyond being thought of as
a “woman architect,” and the A.I.A.’s determination to refer to her,
even in death, as female before it used the word “architect” suggests
that the profession has not progressed as far beyond its sexist past as
Hadid had hoped it would. Not that Hadid, who was born in Iraq and based
her practice in London, played down her gender. She reveled in her
status as an architectural icon, and she saw herself as paving the way
for other women to follow. But her goal was always to get to a point
where she would be thought of as an architect first, and as a woman—an
Arab-born one at that—second.
In most of the world, she achieved her wish. By dint of hard work,
extraordinary talent, gritty determination, and an unforgettable
persona, she made herself one of the best-known figures in
architecture—one of the few that had currency outside of the
architecture world as well as within it. She was, in every sense of the
word, a presence. Large and regal in her bearing, dressed in flowing
capes of her own design, she did not so much occupy space as command it.
She seemed to fly nonstop around the world, first to build her name by
lecturing in architecture schools and museums, and later, as her
practice grew, to visit her job sites, scattered across Europe, Asia,
the Mideast, and the United States. She gave the world such
unforgettable shapes as the swooping London Aquatics Centre; the
Guangzhou Opera House, in China; the BMW Central Building, in Leipzig,
Germany; and the Heydar Aliyev Center, in Azerbaijan, a building of
concrete that dances like folded paper. By the time of her death, her
firm had a staff of more than 400, several times the size of most other
architecture offices committed to serious, cutting-edge design.
One of Hadid's design creations: The Heydar Aliyev Center in Baku, Azerbaijan.
By Robert Ghement/EPA/Corbis.
That success didn’t exempt her from being called an architecture diva, and of being thought difficult to deal with. (Or, in 2014,
of being called out on the issue of construction-worker conditions.)
Almost every famous architect gets thought of as the reincarnation of
Howard Roark from time to time, but Hadid had it worse than most, since
for every accusation of arrogance that a male architect gets there seems
to be someone willing to excuse it by saying that toughness is a
necessary part of his job. Fewer people will cut a woman that slack, and
the cliché of a difficult, shrewish woman is a lot harder to overcome
than the cliché of a forceful man. I once heard a museum director refer
to Hadid as the Lady Gaga of architecture, and it was easy to think of
her as a wild woman who made wild things. But when you got to know her,
she was not nearly as wild as her public presence suggested, but capable
of humor, irony, warmth, and, more often than one would think,
gentleness.
I might say the same about her buildings. They are not nearly as wild
as they seemed at first glance, with their exuberant, swooping forms
and sharp, slashing angles. It’s true that Hadid delighted in unusual
shapes and would resign a commission before she would design a plain
box. (“People think that the most appropriate building is a rectangle . .
. but the world is not a rectangle.”) Yet the shapes and lines and
angles she produced were never arbitrary or silly. They always had some
connection to the specific architectural problem at hand, and to the
place in which her buildings were set.
What Hadid wanted, what she sought above all, was an expansion of
architectural possibility. She saw architecture as a social art, and not
purely as a matter of form making, and she wanted shapes and forms to
engage people, to excite them and to elicit an emotional response. She
was fascinated by urban density and by Russian constructivism, and she
wanted to somehow find a way to use the early modernist forms that had
inspired her as the basis for a new architecture that would reflect in
form and space the complexity of contemporary urban life.
If there was anything she had no patience for, it was an architecture
that shied away from engagement. “For me there was never any doubt that
architecture must contribute to society’s progress and ultimately to
our individual and collective wellbeing,” she said earlier this year, in
her acceptance speech when she was awarded the Gold Medal of the Royal
Institute of British Architects. (She was the first woman to have won
that award as well, although several women have won it in the past in
association with male partners.) “It performs and facilitates everyday
life.”
In New York, her first building, an 11-story, gently curving concrete
condominium building in Chelsea, is now under construction. There are
many more Hadid buildings both finished and still in the works across
the globe, and every one of them seems far more rare and precious now
than it did even yesterday, when there was the possibility of an endless
number of them to look forward to. Not since the deaths of Louis Kahn
in 1974 and Eero Saarinen in 1961 have we lost so important an architect
at the peak of his or her career, and felt a wide-ranging oeuvre
suddenly start to feel unnaturally tiny—a set of short, precious bursts
of a flame now extinguished.
The NYCI, an affiliate of @nycballet, promotes the development of choreographers and dancers involved in classical choreography by providing opportunities.#NYCI
New York, NY ny-ci.org
“I wanted to make a series of portraits of the dancers themselves, as opposed to dancers dancing, to show the character that underpins their performance, to see the determination and sacrifice that it takes to succeed at such a high level.” Rick Guest.
What Lies Beneath A book of dancers portraits by Rick Guest
Published by PUSH Print in large format, 300mm x 370mm
Available at £50 from 15 December 2015 in a limited first run of 1000 copies.
More details at: rg-books.com
Rick Guest: rg-dance.com
There will also be an exhibition of the portraits at The Hospital Club in Covent Garden
Dates: 22 – 31 January 2016
Details: www.thehospitalclub.com
What Lies Beneath: portraits of dancers by Rick Guest – Book Cover
Available at: rg-books.com
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Darksun @Darksun_always 
Melissa Hamilton @hmelissa84 
