The World (89 Degrees)

It presents a culmination of Hadid’s projects to date – her ‘seven-year exploration into architecture’s ‘uncharted territories’ that began with her student work – and a projective vision for the twenty-first century world that she desired to create.

In this painting, her other projects Malevich’s Tektonik (1976–77), Museum of the Nineteenth Century (1977–78), Dutch Parliament Extension (1978–79), Irish Prime Minister’s Residence (1979–80), 59 Eaton Place (1981–82), Parc de la Villette (1982–83) and The Peak (1982–83) are each mapped onto the curvature of a warped and splintered cityscape, with the projects themselves fragmented and sometimes orbiting across the work. Together, they form a composite portfolio that showcases her signature use of painting and combined techniques of abstraction, compression and explosion with a rejection of conventional geometry and perspective. The right-angle is absent, because as Hadid famously later remarked: ‘There are 360 degrees, so why stick to one?’.

While The World represents an imagined urban field – a London in Hadid’s image, as if seen from space – its experimental scaling, layering and reconfiguration of cartographic terrains became an essential method in the development of subsequent projects, particularly regenerative masterplans such as A New Barcelona (1989) and Abu Dhabi’s Hotel and Residential Complex (1990).