On the Rumor of a Building That Flows Like Water

In my workshop this evening, by the light of three candles and the dying fire, a most extraordinary rumor has reached me — carried, they say, from times yet unborn. I set it down here as I set down all things: with wonder, and with suspicion, and with the hunger to understand. They speak of a building in a distant land — Baku, a name I have heard whispered by Venetian merchants who trade along the eastern routes — a structure of fifty-seven thousand square braccia or more, which rises from the earth not as a box, not as a dome, not as any form I know, but as a continuous surface, seamless, as if the ground itself had been persuaded to curl upward into walls and roof without joints or interruption. A woman — a woman! — conceived it. They call her Zaha. I confess this pleases me. Nature herself is feminine, and who better to echo her geometries? But how? This is what torments me. I have spent years studying how water folds over a weir, how fabric drapes across a knee, how the membranes between a bat's fingers stretch into the architecture of flight. Every curve I draw in these notebooks — the turbulence of the Arno, the spiral of a shell, the vortex in a basin — obeys a logic that is both mathematical and sensual. They say this future building does the same. They call their method parametricism, a word built from the Latin parametrum — a measure set beside another measure. That is to say: every dimension governs its neighbor, as in a living body, where the length of the femur dictates the arc of the stride. Questions I must pose: — What material bends so willingly? Stone will not do it. Timber resists. Is it some alloy unknown to me, or a kind of calcite mixed with iron? — How do they calculate the forces? I can barely persuade my patrons that an arch need not be semicircular. These people seem to have abolished the arch altogether. — Does it leak? Any surface without seams must still shed rain. — One thousand seats within! The acoustics — do they follow the parabola, as I have theorized for the echo chambers? I have always held that painting, engineering, anatomy, and the study of waters are one discipline viewed from different windows. This rumor confirms it. Whoever built this thing understood what I understand: that the curve is the signature of God, and to build with it is to write in His hand. I shall sketch what I imagine tonight, in mirror-script, before the candles fail.