Zaha Hadid produced her monumental acrylic painting The World (89 degrees) for Planetary Architecture Two, a solo exhibition held in 1983 at the Architectural Association in London. 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).
