Strong Words for Zaha's Ordrupgaard Addition

New links brought a late reading of some strong criticism in Metropolis Magazine this month. Philip Nobel recounts the first Hadid-designed building he visited (an addition to the Ordrupgaard Museum in Copenhagen). While very personal, the article is unexpectedly scathing in tone and content. Here a critic is disconnecting a building from the designer's persona and mystique. Readers have to cut through a little drama, as the first third of the article is just as much about the writer as the subject. From December's Metropolis...

"What I was reacting to was a failure right up in the heart of the Zaha myth. The problem with the building was its form. Form! I hadn't been prepared to find that Zaha was, on her own terms, an inept form-maker. But there it was. The turns and wraps of the concrete slabs didn't match; where the different geometries met it was a travesty, and where straight lines intervened, as they always do, it was appalling. Her forms were simply not speaking the same language; they were not derived from the same topological genus. There was nothing coherent about it. And I doubt she was going for collage."

That first sentence catches lovers of the English language off guard too. Coming off the recent adoption of 'truthiness' by the the American Dialect Society, one gets the impression that the publisher have begun a lobby for 'architecturedom' in next years ADS announcements.