(soft music) - My name's Craig Kiner, I'm an Associate Director at Zaha Hadid Architects in London.

Zaha Hadid was the architect for the Eli and Edythe Board Art Museum at Michigan State University.

Zaha was a designer, first and foremost.

To be a designer, it's to look at all aspects of life critically and that title of designer extended across the entire gamut of design.

Painting was part of her design language.

She brought in that skill of drawing and painting.

A lot of the design inspiration for the projects came from her sketches.

Zaha, she felt like design didn't have boundaries, it didn't have limitations, whether that was architecture, product design, jewelry, home furnishings, fashion.

Even when she was in school she would be making or modifying her own clothes.

And that passion for design extended across all areas of design.

She very much felt that kind of teaching was part of her career, sharing her passion for architecture and spatial design.

The Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University, people have kind of very different interpretations of it.

The inspiration was local context and landscape.

Some of the inspiration as well came from Detroit and the automobile industry, the refinement of metalwork and the materiality of the building and the movement between the campus and the town.

Those movement lines that we generated, began to form these patchwork areas on the ground.

So kind of two dimensionally as one overlaid those movement lines.

And as we began to think of the building volumetrically, what is the programmatic context of the building?

It's gallery spaces, it's for the display of artwork.

So how do those movement lines begin to generate those gallery spaces themselves?

(soft music) When one talks about volume, we mean the internal space.

It's the walls that define that spacial enclosure.

And in the galleries specifically, it's those volumes that define where one can display artwork.

If you look at the building from Grand River Avenue you see that it's actually leaning.

So those movement lines had a direct influence on the kind of the overall volume.

So all those walls that are facing East West are inclined, hence that might be challenging for the display of artwork as normally artwork is displayed on flat walls.

Zaha was very much a proponent of challenging that.

Why is artwork always displayed in a very white cube type setting?

I think one of the most important things we learned from Zaha was how we kind of look at the world differently, how we kind of experience space differently.

You need to be able to experience the building in many different ways.

As one approaches a building, what is your impression of that from a distance?

As you get closer and closer to the building, that may change and that's very much evident in the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum.

As you approach the building, it changes quite dramatically through the various light conditions and during the seasons of the year.

The material that we used for the exterior skin is stainless steel.

This surface treatment of that stainless steel was equally important.

It's a finish called angel hair which is a non-directional finish.

It's not a brushed surface where a brushed surface on stainless steel can be quite dull.

A polished surface is very reflective.

Angel hair is kind of somewhere between.

It scatters light so it doesn't reflect it.

It scatters it, creating this almost glowing surface.

You'll see it reflecting the the blue sky or reflecting the sunshine.

But equally as the light conditions change throughout the day, that finish of the material reflects that change.

And you'll see some of the pleats that are facing more up have a different reflective quality than the ones that are facing down.

We wanted that building to be this jewel, so this jewelry box, but it was kind of very much wanting to kind of open it up and see what's inside of it.

As one moves through the building, you maybe notice a number of things that are different about the building.

One of them being kind of as you're entering gallery spaces you'll see a black frame around the entrance to those galleries.

We call them portals, which was a signifier about how one moves between circulation spaces and a gallery space.

The concrete walls, they're only facing public areas.

So in those movement spaces, say walking down the spine, as we call it, between east and west, there're concrete walls facing that as well as the polished concrete floors.

In galleries, the galleries are wood floors.

Zaha's quote, "there's no end to experimentation", that means for me, you keep pushing yourself.

There's no boundaries to where that experimentation lies.

And experimentation, I think as well means improvement.

As one experiments, you may go through a series of loops or circles but at the end of that path the solutions and the ideas that you come up with are better than the ones at the beginning.

You know, we always kind of ask ourselves, would that be good enough for Zaha?

Would she really accept this stage of design?

And the answer is almost always no.

Hence the idea of constantly pushing ourselves, constantly exploring, constantly experimenting.

Zaha was very passionate that artwork wasn't just for the privileged.

She felt like everybody should be both informed and be inspired by art.

As like our buildings be inspired by the kind of spacial expression of the buildings but with regard to artwork, that it should be approachable, it should be available to everyone and it allows people to look at life and to look at their relationship to their environment differently.

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