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| Metropolis, London (2014) Metropolis was commissioned for an exhibition of architects at the ICA, London. Depicting the city as a polycentric patchwork of villages that have evolved and expanded over centuries, Hadid’s painting highlights the disparate urban centres competing to establish new focal points. The River Thames is imagined as a winding orange and yellow boundary, demarcating the different sides of the city |
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| Blue and Green Scrapers (1990) Hadid described her proposal for the renovation of London’s Leicester Square in radical terms: ‘We would rather see Leicester Square as a public room, habitable and submerged beneath the surface, a heart that beats within the city. We would turn such structures upside down and sink them into the ground. Solid and transparent skyscrapers slicing into the earth could contain accommodation, and water could cascade down these inverted canyons as a cooling mechanism for an overworked heart’ |
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| The World (89 Degrees) (1983) The culmination of Zaha Hadid’s seven years studying at London’s Architecture Association, this painting visualised technology’s rapid development and our ever-changing urban lifestyles as the new pivotal factors in architecture. |
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| Hafenstrasse Development, Hamburg (1989) A scheme to develop two sites on the old Hafenstrasse (meaning ‘harbour street’) had to take into consideration their surrounding traditional four- and five-storey houses, as well as the River Elbe. Hadid imagined links between the strips, and the embankment becoming an urban beach or sports field; she painted it in a twisting geometry of horizontals and diagonals |
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| Trafalgar Square, London (1985) Hadid’s first exploration into London’s urban character, this painting imagined a proposal to regenerate Trafalgar Square. Central to the design is a public podium, slabs of offices and towers capped by penthouses and subterranean lobbies. A shopping concourse embraces the boundary of the site, enclosing public space as it rises upwards towards the roof, which features a communal terrace overlooking the traffic below |
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| Vision for Madrid (1992) This visualisation of Madrid focused on four areas of regeneration: transforming the industrial fabric around the city’s railways into lively parks and leisure landscapes; concentrating commercial development along the strip corridor leading to the airport; enhancing the important municipal avenue Paseo de Castellana by inserting buildings into existing slivers and public spaces into open pockets; and preserving the remaining green spaces and gaps in urbanisation in the suburbs |
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| Berlin 2000 (1988) Before the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Zaha Hadid Architects was invited to speculate about the city’s future. The fall of the Wall offered a new potential for regeneration between the axes of Mehringplatz to Bahnhof Friedrichstrasse and Brandenburger Tor to Alexanderplatz. The focus of Hadid’s vision here was Alexanderplatz |
Source: The millionaire's darling: Zaha Hadid's urban artworks – in pictures
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