The Baghdad-born, London-based architect Zaha Hadid is one of the most important contemporary exponents of sculptural architecture. This term—which became prevalent at the beginning of the twentieth century—is most often applied to asymmetrical, freestanding, and labyrinthine structures whose plan and layout cannot be reconstructed from a single frontal viewpoint. Rather, the viewer has to walk around and through the building to comprehend it. Sculptural architecture is thus the corollary to sculpture “in the round”: It is predicated o n movement and activity.

The organizers of Hadid’s

“What is the flesh? What is the physical being of man? What exactly is he made of? Tell us this afternoon, Herr Hofrat, tell us exactly, and once and for all, so that we may know!” demands Hans Castorp, protagonist of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. Unsatisfied by the Hofrat’s reply—“Water”—he embarks on his own research. Swaddled in fur and wool on his sickbed, he scours volumes on anatomy, biochemistry, and pathology. Scientific facts inexorably segue into metaphysical speculation; Castorp sinks into perverse, voluptuous hallucinations that mix the cosmological, the theological,