A 14-storey bridge, an underground skyscraper cooled by a waterfall, a building that falls apart as it crosses the river … the late architect’s spectacular plans for London have been turned into an absorbing, gravity-defying show
A blood red River Thames hurtles across a long sheet of black paper on the wall, splicing through a fractured landscape of city blocks that twist and sway as if commanded by some irresistible force. Tangled webs of arteries fan outwards from the centre of London, breaking through the M25 and surging eastwards, meeting in a crescendo of coloured shards that look ready to accelerate off the page.
The irresistible force flexing London’s urban fabric was Zaha Hadid. The late Iraqi-born architect painted this warp-speed vision in 1991, at the request of Vogue magazine, projecting 75 years into the future to imagine what the capital might look like in 2066. Combining plans, sections and distorted aerial perspective views – long before computers aided the creation of such complex visions – it was typical of her intricate, multilayered style of image-making, using the process of painting as a way of generating new ideas. “I think that through a set of drawings,” Hadid said, “one discovers certain things which would not have otherwise been possible.”
Even once drawn, most of her futuristic dreams for London remained impossible. But now, six years after her death, they have been brought together in an exhibition: the inaugural show to be held at the Zaha Hadid Foundation, including some works seen for the first time. Curated by a group of MA students from the Courtauld Institute of Art as part of the London Festival of Architecture, Zaha Hadid: Reimagining London fittingly occupies the ground floor of her former studio in a Victorian school building in Clerkenwell, which now serves as the foundation’s headquarters. Where once sat serried ranks of young architects hunched over their screens, now hang some of the radical drawings and models that formed the origins of her practice.
