Inside the Zaha Hadid Foundation and the iconic architect’s remarkable archive

Zaha Hadid's sudden death at the age of 65, in 2016, was a cruel blow. Having fought so hard for her ideas, she was at the height of her career and had so much more to do. It was an incalculable loss in a world that desperately needs her sense of ambition and visionary thinking. An extraordinary architect and individual, Hadid's personality and professional output are hard to disentangle, and nowhere is this more evident than in her vast archive of drawings, models, furniture, clothing and design tools.

Step inside the Zaha Hadid Foundation and its archive

Her former tutor at the Architectural Association (AA), Rem Koolhaas, famously described her as ‘a planet in her own orbit.' The phrase aptly captures the enormity of her talent and the vivid image of a person who was constantly questioning and creating, in a class of her own. With characteristic foresight, in 2013, Hadid set up the Zaha Hadid Foundation (ZHF) with three main objectives: to support the education of young people in architecture, design and related disciplines; to take care of her archive and collections and produce exhibitions; and to establish or support a permanent museum or gallery. A few months after setting up the ZHF, she bought the site of the former Design Museum at Shad Thames, next to Tower Bridge in London, for approximately £10m. Sadly, she did not live to complete her vision for a museum there, but her team at Zaha Hadid Architects moved the archives and collections to the site in the summer of 2018 to continue the archiving process.

Hadid often seemed to live in a future world, imagining a form of architecture that was well beyond our experience. Indeed, for the first decade of her career, she struggled to find a client who would commit to her bold vision. At the same time, she was a magpie with an avid interest in the world around her. She was fascinated by culture, other architects' work, and the related disciplines of fashion, design and art. She was a keen collector and shopper, who would acquire work by a fashion graduate she had spotted at their catwalk show; or buy the same shoes or garments in several colourways.

For many architects, legacy is about the buildings they leave behind rather than the rolls of drawings and models that gather dust (or the servers full of CAD files, a struggle for museums due to constant software updates). Conventionally, an architect's output becomes part of the built fabric of society, whereas in the case of Hadid, legacy is a broader and more complex subject. There is no doubt that she changed the course of architectural practice. But in the UK – the country she chose to make her home, having grown up in Iraq – her vision was not widely accepted. Despite the advances in design thinking and construction that she led, British architecture largely consists of what her long-term friend and current ZHF trustee, Archigram co-founder Peter Cook, describes as vernacular-inspired, ‘biscuit-coloured' buildings.

During her life, Hadid completed around 35 buildings, alongside pavilions, installations, and design, furniture and fashion projects. Built work includes the Vitra Fire Station (1991) in Weil am Rhein, Phaeno Science Center (2005) in Wolfsburg (both in Germany), MAXXI Museum of XXI Century Arts in Rome (2009) and the London Aquatics Centre (2012). More than 35 projects were in progress at the time of her death, including the Port Authority Building in Antwerp and the Mathematics Gallery at London's Science Museum.

Her ideas, particularly research into parametricism, virtual worlds, product design and new materials, continue to be developed by the architectural practice that now operates as ZHA. In June this year, the practice replaced her name following a court case, in which ZHA won the right to terminate the 2014 agreement that committed the company to paying six per cent of its revenue to the ZHF to continue using her name. The ruling and title change mark a new era in the practice's development. The renaming has caused controversy among many of Hadid's loyal followers, but as ZHA principal, Patrik Schumacher, says, ‘Of course, we love Zaha, and we've been working with her, the leadership and myself, for many decades, on these projects, but she's no longer with us – in spirit only – and we have a lot of new projects coming out.'

The court ruling, which came a decade after Hadid's death, also marks a new era for the ZHF under the leadership of architecture and design curator Aric Chen. Since the summer of 2025, Chen has brought a fresh wave of energy, initiating a new brand identity and website by Amsterdam-based design collective Experimental Jetset, as well as a light renovation by Studio KA of the practice's former studio, on Bowling Green Lane in Clerkenwell, which will become a public architecture centre complete with residency space and room for temporary shows and other programmes. Alongside this, the team is accelerating its work to catalogue and display Hadid's collections and archive, most of which are stored at Shad Thames.

Plans are also coming together for a major retrospective exhibition, aiming to tour Europe, Asia, the Middle East and the US. One of Chen's first moves, just a few months into the job, was to organise regular ‘Guess Who's in Town' evening events, where a mystery architect visiting London is invited to speak to an audience about their work. The sense of fun, informal debate and international glamour of these events seems an appropriate way to honour Hadid's fast-paced life, strong views and global network. Chen acknowledges that the ZHF's two properties need a lot of work, and that it will take time to plan for the future. In the meantime, his aim is for the Clerkenwell studio to provide galleries and education spaces for architectural culture, welcoming the public five days a week.

Chen has been busy creating alliances that reflect the life and work of Hadid. This autumn, to mark the relaunch of the ZHF, the team is planning a two-day, multi-venue symposium. Taking place 30-31 October (the latter being Hadid's birthday), the event will be a collaboration between the ZHF, the AA and the Serpentine, which built one of her first completed buildings, a temporary pavilion in the summer of 2000 (it was also the Serpentine's inaugural pavilion). Chen describes the planned sessions as ranging from ‘scholarship to gossip', looking at influences from the architect's early years in Baghdad and Beirut, through to her student days at the AA, her furniture and product designs, and the broader networks of clients, media and institutions in which she operated.

Over at Shad Thames, the archive is a longer-term project. The building is more than 40 years old and in a poor state of repair, with buckets positioned below the rooflights to catch rainwater drips. It is a concern that Hadid's collection – arguably one of the largest and most diverse archives ever created by an architect – is being held in such conditions. However, the team says it is undertaking improvements in order to maintain the progress of its inventory.

In Zaha Hadid: Complete Works, published by Thames & Hudson in 2004, US architect Greg Lynn, who taught alongside Hadid at Yale School of Architecture, wrote she ‘has always been at the epicentre of innovation of architectural communication, as well as having one of the strongest creative visions in our field... She combines painting, projective geometry, perspective, model building, computer renderings and smooth curvaceous geometric surfaces into the masses, interiors and structure of her buildings.'

The 2004 publication was a remarkable object in its own right – its red Perspex box contained four hardback volumes, of varying shapes and sizes, which seemed to explode from its sides. Lynn compared Hadid to the Italian Renaissance architect and stage designer Vincenzo Scamozzi and to Inigo Jones, the 17th-century architect, who also designed elaborate stage sets and costumes.

In the early years, Hadid's focus on ‘paper architecture' reinforced her drive to work in different formats, including set design. This work will be the subject of an exhibition at the ZHF in the newly renovated gallery in October. Curated jointly by Libby Sellers and ZHF's Catherine Howe, it will consider how Hadid's architectural language extended into immersive environments for contemporary dance, classical opera and pop music, and will include the Music Video Pavilion in Groningen, Netherlands (1990), which was commissioned for an urban festival promoting the fast-growing music video phenomenon, as well as a set for the Pet Shop Boys' Nightlife world tour (1999-2000).

Hadid's remarkable archive will be the subject of research, speculation and debate for years to come. Chen aims to make the material as accessible to students and scholars as possible, but he also faces a challenge. The ZHF consists of a team of 16, eight of whom are collections and research staff working their way through thousands of items, many of which have not been catalogued. Rolls of drawings are stacked up in tubes, with no detailed inventories. Part of the problem is that, although the entire archive covering the period up to 2016, including paintings, models and Hadid's fashion collection, was transferred from the practice to the ZHF in 2019, the digital transfer of the data, including provenance for objects in the collection, has been complicated.

Because of incompatibility between digital platforms, the ZHF collections and research teams are having to painstakingly retrieve information and add it to a new database. At the time of Hadid's death, the studio had inventorised and assigned unique archive collection numbers to roughly 17,000 objects. Given the scale of the archive and the resources available, many items had not been processed. Since then, the ZHF team has continued the documentation and cataloguing programme, resulting in a rough estimate of approximately 300,000 objects in the collection as a whole.

For Hadid, the collecting and archival process was of fundamental importance, and its origins reflect her holistic design vision. On a personal level, the collection includes her clothes (both those she collected for their design value and those she wore), shoes, handbags and furniture, together with her own designs for shoes, bags and jewellery. There are also folders of receipts from her clothing purchases, carefully put to one side. In her library, architecture books – many of them gifts from friends – sit alongside exhibition and building product catalogues, and copies of her favourite DVDs, including American Gigolo, which she reportedly used to watch on repeat.

Why did she keep all this stuff ? ‘I read into it a kind of sweet sentimentality,' says Chen. ‘She felt deeply about things, and people were important to her.' Many of the objects give an insight into Hadid's personality, and in particular, her playful side. For example, she is pictured on the cover of a publication accompanying her 1989 solo show at Arc en Rêve in Bordeaux, wearing an asymmetrical jacket that she had hand-painted, featuring a single ‘googly eye' tucked into one of its lower corners.

ZHA's head of exhibitions and archive Manon Janssens worked alongside Hadid for more than 20 years and formed a unique insight into her magpie-like ways. ‘The archive was at the centre of her practice. It was never considered a dead repository; it was very much alive and constantly consulted, revisited and used,' she notes. ‘Every detail was important to her, from the clothes she wore to how she lived at home and the office. She never threw anything away. The archive preserves not only the final outcomes but also the evidence of Zaha's creative thinking and development.'

Janssens joined the practice in 2003 as press officer. Hadid was much in demand as a speaker, and the pair often travelled around the world together, with Janssens preparing slides for lectures, responding to press requests and organising press conferences, such as for the Pritzker Prize ceremony at the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg in 2004. At that stage, the archive was recorded on a series of Excel spreadsheets, with items listed mainly if they had been part of exhibitions. There was no full catalogue, but Janssens recalls ‘colourful polaroids glued to boxes to show what was inside'. She says, ‘Zaha would frequently challenge me to locate models or documents at short notice, reinforcing the need for a database that was capable of tracking all things in the archive and its continual growth.'

Janssens left in 2005 for a stint at David Chipperfield Architects, but returned in 2008 to work on the practice's exhibitions, together with Zaha Hadid Design director Woody Yao, and to set up detailed catalogues of its physical and digital assets. These operated as a research tool, while also supporting the regular requests for loans and exhibitions that came from all over the world. Having visited archives at the Tate, Royal Academy, V&A and various global practices, the decision was made to build a bespoke cataloguing system that could deal with specific Hadid requests – for example, automating printing of well-designed product booklets, linking the personal archive to an iPad app, or printing shipping labels.

The bespoke catalogue is still in operation as the brain of the renamed ZHA, but the pre-2016 objects have been physically handed over to the ZHF. While it is understandable that the ZHF chose to adopt a system designed for museum collections (TMS), the bespoke digital platform itself is arguably a Hadid-designed ‘object'. Her dedication to producing such a sophisticated tool reflects the importance of exhibitions to Hadid and the meticulous way she approached them. The system was beautifully designed with graphic icons to symbolise categories of items, and even recorded the clothing Hadid had worn to particular exhibition openings. From 1981 to date, the practice participated in and organised 250 exhibitions, ranging from installations in art galleries and private residences to loans and displays at major retrospective exhibitions, such as those that took place at the Guggenheim in New York (2006), the Design Museum in London (2007), the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg (2015), the Palazzo Franchetti in Venice (2016) or, most recently, at the Museum of Contemporary Art and Urban Planning in Shenzhen (2026).

Hadid's creation of the ZHF and her dedication to collecting were part of her commitment to making a better world, and that vision was inseparable from design innovation. The founding document of the charity specifically states that it should ‘advance the public knowledge of modern architecture…and the parametric style.' Today, in the UK at least, parametricism – a style that was synonymous with Hadid – seems out of step with a culture that is more interested in small-scale, artisanal approaches to making buildings. So it seems fair to ask, how will the ZHF be true to Hadid, as well as being, as Chen puts it, ‘relevant to our time'?

Chen believes the notion that Hadid was futuristic is reductive: ‘It relies on a singular notion of what the future looks like,' he says. ‘Zaha was immersed in the present – she didn't think she was futuristic. She was about invention and imagination, re-envisioning spatiality and the ways we live and operate in the here and now.' He chuckles, recalling the famous quote of French philosopher Paul Valéry, ‘The trouble with our times is that the future isn't what it used to be'.

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