Museum report·London
Zaha Hadid Foundation turns architect's London headquarters into public arts venue
The Zaha Hadid Foundation is reopening the architect's former Clerkenwell headquarters, a Grade II-listed Victorian schoolhouse, as a public cultural space on November 3, ten years after her death, with galleries, a lecture hall, and the Foundation's first collection-based exhibition on her stage and set designs.

In the tenth anniversary year of Zaha Hadid's death, the Zaha Hadid Foundation is opening the architect's former London headquarters at 10 Bowling Green Lane as a public cultural space dedicated to architecture, design and the related arts. A press and private preview is scheduled for October 29, with the building opening to the public on November 3. The Grade II-listed Victorian schoolhouse in Clerkenwell, built in the early 1870s, served as Hadid's practice for more than three decades. The refurbishment was led by Katherine Nolan and Alex Butterworth of London-based Studio KA, who reconfigured the ground floor to hold galleries, a learning space, a lecture hall and collection displays, alongside Zaha Hadid Design, which presents furniture and objects by Hadid and her studio. Original features including fireplaces and doorways were restored, while details Hadid herself introduced — Z-shaped door pulls and shard-like flooring insets — were preserved, and new finishes draw their palette from her paintings. The opening 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, from her 1989 collaboration with choreographer Rosemary Butcher to her 2014 staging of Mozart's Così fan tutte. A second gallery will present "The Rebar Beneath," an 11-minute video commission by multidisciplinary artist LionHeart developed through research in Hadid's archive. Illustrator Mona Chalabi has created a timeline visualisation of Hadid's life and work for the foyer, to be projected onto a textile referencing an Issey Miyake coat from the architect's own wardrobe, now held in the collection. The opening will also be marked by a two-day symposium organised with the Architectural Association and the Serpentine Galleries, and the Foundation's chair Rana Hadid has framed the project as the realisation of Hadid's own wish that the foundation preserve her legacy while carrying her ideas forward.


