In the 10th anniversary year of Zaha Hadid's death, the Zaha Hadid Foundation is reopening its former headquarters at 10 Bowling Green Lane in London as a public cultural space for architecture, design, and related arts. A press and private view is scheduled for October 29th ahead of a public opening on November 3rd.
The Victorian schoolhouse, built in the early 1870s, served as Hadid's practice for more than 30 years. The foundation’s refurbishment, led by Katherine Nolan and Alex Butterworth of London-based Studio KA, restores original features including a fireplace and doorways while preserving details Hadid herself introduced, such as Z-shaped door pulls and shard-like flooring insets. The reconfigured ground floor will house galleries, a learning space, a lecture hall, and collection displays, alongside Zaha Hadid Design, which features furniture and objects by Hadid and her studio.
The building’s debut exhibition, “Zaha Hadid: Architecture of Performance,” curated by Catherine Howe and Libby Sellers, is the Foundation's first collection-based show, tracing how Hadid’s architectural language extended into stage and set design for dance, opera, and pop music, with projects spanning her 1989 collaboration with choreographer Rosemary Butcher to her 2014 staging of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Così fan tutte. A second gallery will debut “The Rebar Beneath,” an 11-minute video commission by multidisciplinary artist LionHeart developed through research in Hadid's archive, while illustrator Mona Chalabi has created a timeline visualization of Hadid’s life and work for the Foundation’s foyer. That will be projected onto a textile referencing an Issey Miyake coat from Hadid’s own wardrobe, now held in the collection.
The reopening will be marked by “89° of Zaha Hadid,” a two-day symposium on October 30th and 31st—the latter being Hadid's birthday—organized with the Architectural Association and the Serpentine, which built her first completed structure, a temporary pavilion, in 2000.
“It was Zaha's wish for the Foundation to preserve her legacy while carrying her ideas forward,” said Rana Hadid, chair of the Foundation's trustees, in a statement, calling the archive “a profound record of her work, imagination and intellectual life.”
The relaunch follows a June court ruling that ended the Foundation's royalty agreement with Hadid's former practice, now operating simply as ZHA, and comes under Foundation director Aric Chen, who since 2025 has pushed to open Hadid's archive, once described by her AA tutor Rem Koolhaas as belonging to “a planet in her own orbit,” to wider public view.
from Artsy News https://ift.tt/Jl8fYxg
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