Ahead of the Curve

Ahead of the Curve
There must be something about gardens that bring out poetry in architects.

In the case of Zaha Hadid, we are not talking Coleridge or Wordsworth, or any other writer who drew inspiration from romantic landscapes and rewrote them in their own lyrical ways, but of something harder altogether, something far more concrete and yet quite unlike the prose (however polished and inspiring) architects shape in concrete and steel on streets in city centres.

Zaha Hadid's latest completed design, the �4.5m garden extension to the Ordrupgaard Museum at Charlottenlund, some 20 minutes west by train from central Copenhagen, is a concrete sonnet, more metaphysical perhaps than Romantic.

It compresses many of her ideas into one relatively small building, which is as graceful as it is unexpected in the setting of a seaside Danish country house garden.

The new building, a collaboration as usual with her design partner Patrick Schumaker, is a thing of almost natural curves, where Hadid normally does straight lines shooting off at sensational, Soviet Constructivist-sty le angles.

It is made, principally, of concrete poured direct on site,