Curated by Germano Celant and Mónica Ramírez-Montagut

In the late ’70s and ’80s, exhibitions were the real performance stage for Zaha Hadid. A visionary architect of unrealizable works—or so it was said at the time—Hadid could present experimental forms of architecture only through her paintings and installations. But all that changed in 1993, when the Vitra fire station—her first major built design—was completed in Weil am Rhein, Germany. This ambitious retrospective comprises some four hundred works, including documentation of her most recent realizations, like the Phaeno Science Centre in Wolfsburg, Germany, completed in 2005 (a year after she won the Pritzker Prize), as well as the models, drawings, paintings, and computer renderings with which Hadid had made a reputation even before becoming an acclaimed international star.

— Emiliano Gandolfi