Zaha Hadid Foundation inaugural exhibit explores the late architect’s radical reinventions of London

Timed to coincide with the London Festival of Architecture, the Zaha Hadid Foundation (ZHF) has announced it will stage its first-ever exhibition…and it’s one that, most appropriately, takes a deep dive into the “radical reinventions” envisioned by the late Pritzker Prize–winning Iraqi-British architect for her longtime home of London.

Opening on June 8, the free and notably student-curated exhibition, entitled Zaha Hadid: Reimagining London, will be held at the former headquarters of Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA) at an erstwhile Victorian school building on Bowling Green Lane in Clerkenwell, central London. As announced at the full formal launch of the ZHF this past March, the physical footprint of the foundation, which will eventually oversee a permanent museum, gallery, learning center, research hub, and think tank, will be split between two brick-and-mortar locations: the old ZHA offices where the inaugural exhibition will be on view (the firm decamped this past summer due to difficulties converting the historic building into a post-pandemic workplace) and at the former Design Museum space within a converted banana ripening warehouse on Shad Thames that Hadid had purchased in 2013.

Location aside, Zaha Hadid: Reimagining London presents an expansive deep dive into the foundation’s archives and collections to uncover a trove of “rare and unseen” works, including Hadid’s personal sketchbooks, from her over four decades in practice—a prolific and highly decorated career spanning architecture, art, and design that was cut devastatingly short when she died in March 2016 while in Miami. Hadid was 65 at the time of her passing.

As noted in a press release announcing the inaugural exhibition, although Baghdad-born Hadid lived and worked in London for decades after first arriving in the British capital in 1972 to study at the Architectural Association, scant London-based projects designed by her eponymous practice during her lifetime were ever realized. “And yet from her student years, Hadid was profoundly inspired by London’s complex cityscape,” the statement reads. “This exhibition assembles her visions for London for the first time.”

On view are a variety of media including paintings, drawings, collages, and models that “reveal her distinctive thought process and innovative design methods, shown in projects ranging from utopian imaginings to competition entries and finished buildings.” The centerpiece is London 2066, a large-scale painting created in 1991 that imagines what London would look like 75 years in the future. Through Hadid’s singular vision, the city is “stretched eastwards and its arteries flow in new directions.” As noted in the exhibition announcement, this “expansion of the metropolis eastwards” is realized in the London Aquatics Centre, designed by Hadid in 2004 and built for the 2012 Olympic Games as one of her modest few realized projects in the city.

Zaha Hadid: Reimagining London is, as mentioned, curated by a student team from the Courtauld Institute of Art’s MA program, Curating the Art Museum. (The Courtauld is an independent college of the University of London.) “Our aim is to facilitate the work of architects, designers, artists, scholars, and the general public alike, in order to advance knowledge across the creative sector,” explained ZHF Director Paul Greenhalgh in a statement. “This exhibition by the Courtauld’s MA Curating students is the first in a series of creative collaborations with educational partners.”

A series of live events will accompany the exhibition, including a panel discussion, a talk with architect Nigel Coats, and a “late evening opening” held on June 10 in conjunction with the London Festival of Architecture (a full run-down of the month-long slate of city-wide festivities can be found here.) Zaha Hadid: Reimagining London closes on July 2; AN plans on publishing a review of the exhibition during its run.

The ZHF was first established in 2013 by Hadid but its full realization was considerably delayed by both her unexpected death and the messy legal row over her estate that followed. The founding purpose of the foundation is preserving and making publicly available the “full range of Zaha’s extraordinary output” while “advancing research, learning, and the enjoyment of related areas of modern architecture, art, and design.” Shortly following the belated full launch of the ZHF in March, the London School of Architecture announced a new, full-ride scholarship program for a total of three students who are refugees or come from low-income backgrounds, potentially including displaced architecture students from war-ravaged Ukraine. Funds for the scholarship program were made possible by a donation from ZHF.

Zaha Hadid: Reimagining London
June 8–July 2, 2022

On view at the Zaha Hadid Foundation
10 Bowling Green Lane, London, EC1R 0BQ
Opening Hours: Tuesday–Saturday, 11 a.m. to 5.30 p.m.
Admission is free