A red brick Victorian school on a quiet street in Clerkenwell, tall windows, nothing on the façade to suggest that some of the most radical buildings of the last thirty years were drawn inside. For more than three decades, 10 Bowling Green Lane was Zaha Hadid’s studio. From 3 November it opens to the public as the new home of the Zaha Hadid Foundation, a space for architecture, design and art.
The building dates from the early 1870s and is Grade II listed. London practice Studio KA, founded by Katherine Nolan and Alex Butterworth, has reworked the ground floor with a light hand: circulation is clearer, original fireplaces and doorways have been reopened, and new finishes take their colours from Hadid’s paintings. What we like is that the studio’s own layer of history has not been scrubbed away. The Z-shaped door pulls and the shard-like inserts in the floor that Hadid added during her years here are still in place, alongside furniture and objects by Zaha Hadid Design.
The new hub brings together galleries, a lecture hall, a learning space and displays drawn from the Foundation’s archive, with exhibitions, talks, workshops and residencies to follow. “It will be where Zaha’s legacy will live on both through our programmes and exhibitions drawn from her archive,” says director Aric Chen.
The opening exhibition is a smart choice. Zaha Hadid: Architecture of Performance, curated by Catherine Howe with guest curator Libby Sellers, looks at a less familiar side of her work: sets and stages. It runs from her 1989 collaboration with choreographer Rosemary Butcher and the Music Video Pavilion in Groningen to the Pet Shop Boys’ Nightlife World Tour and Mozart’s Così fan tutte at Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. Seen together, these projects carry the same obsessions as her buildings (movement, fragmentation, space that never sits still), tested at a faster and more theatrical scale.
Two commissions complete the programme. London artist LionHeart presents The Rebar Beneath, an 11 minute, two-channel video installation built from research in the archive. Pulitzer Prize winning illustrator Mona Chalabi has drawn an animated timeline of Hadid’s life and work, projected in the foyer onto a textile inspired by an Issey Miyake coat that Hadid used to wear.
The reopening also brings a new identity by Amsterdam studio Experimental Jetset, a typographic system that bends along a distorting grid instead of relying on a fixed logo, and a new website by Made by ON. On 30 and 31 October the Foundation, the Architectural Association and Serpentine host 89° of Zaha Hadid, a two-day symposium across their London venues. The second day falls on what would have been her 76th birthday.
Hadid died in 2016, ten years ago this year. Her former office, once closed to anyone outside the practice, now becomes the place where her archive is opened up and put to work. For anyone who follows architecture, it is worth a detour next time you are in London.
Zaha Hadid Foundation, 10 Bowling Green Lane, London EC1R 0BQ. Open to the public from 3 November 2026. Programme and opening hours on zhfoundation.com.
Cover photo: Fred Howarth, courtesy of Studio KA. Archive images © Zaha Hadid Foundation.
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