Zaha Hadid: Reimagining London

The Zaha Hadid Foundation’s inaugural exhibition, Zaha Hadid: Reimagining London, was curated by the MA Curating the Art Museum students at the Courtauld Institute in London, UK.

The exhibition delved into the ZHF collections to uncover rare and unseen archival works, including personal sketchbooks from over forty years of practice, which revealed Zaha’s radical reinventions of London for the first time.

Zaha’s visions for London were expressed through a wide variety of mediums that reveal her distinctive thought process and innovative design methods, from projects in utopian imaginings to competition entries and finished buildings. The exhibition traced the development of her ideas from her earliest student diploma project at the Architectural Association in London, Malevich’s Tektonik (1976–77), which highlighted her influences from twentieth-century Russian Suprematism and the early architectural avant-garde, to London 2066 (1991), a large-scale painting inspired by London’s complex cityscape that envisioned it 75 years into the future.

A public programme accompanied the exhibition, including a special late-night opening of the exhibition after hours, as part of the London Festival of Architecture 2022 Studio Late programme, a panel discussion exploring the intersection of gender in architecture and a talk with renowned British architect Nigel Coates.