A Life in Postcards
There are perhaps a thousand or so picture postcards in the Foundation’s collection, many of which come with a greeting or message scribbled with love on a café table, against the wall of a maligned Modernist masterpiece or in the sand of a far-flung beach. ‘Ciao…’, ‘Dearest Zaha…’, ‘Madame Zed…’, ‘Your eminence…’, ‘Hello Studio 9…’, ‘…All love’, ‘…Missing you’, ‘…Happy New Year’, ‘…See you soon’.
Some come with reports of life in warmer weather, of ‘sailing and swimming and a bit of culture’, of being ‘at the foot of the great mountain […] and about to climb’. ‘Did you know they have red and white sheep in Portugal?’.
Some cards carry home the news of building in Brasília or Hong Kong or Paris, ‘wherever you look there’s a Niemeyer building, quite astonishing. The city itself is astounding too – the scale and sense of space almost over-whelming’.
Some have a congratulations, ‘on winning the H[ong] K[ong] competition, I wish I had won something, but at least someone I know won!’ Or an apology for a missed dinner.
The sender’s choice of card usually seems a knowing wink to Zaha. Many are kitsch memorabilia – maybe a shot of 1970s American holidaymakers on a beach in California, the newly married Charles and Diana, or a cut-out of the Wicked Witch of the West from the 1939 film. Some are humorously mundane picture-postcards: a nighttime image of a motorway in Lisbon, a busy 1950s Paris Metro train, or the television room of a hotel in Miami Beach.
And Zaha kept a large selection of them on a postcard stand, the sort from which they might have first been bought outside a tourist shop, on the other side of the world. Decades of friendships and acquaintances, holidays and work trips. All of which have now been photographed and inventoried, reminding us of the joyous art of the postcard. Certainly, we will be sending a few the next time any of us at the Foundation are away.