Zaha Hadid Foundation Reopens With an Eye on Iraq and Beyond

The Zaha Hadid Foundation reopened last week at 10 Bowling Green Lane in Clerkenwell, London — the late architect's former headquarters — a decade after her death and on what would have been her 76th birthday, October 31. Rana Hadid, the architect's niece and chair of the foundation's trustees, told ARTnews the moment demanded a proper celebration of her aunt's legacy.

What happened at Bedford Square?

The reopening ran alongside a two-day symposium at the Architectural Association's Bedford Square campus, staged with the architecture school and the Serpentine. Titled "89 Degrees of Zaha Hadid," the event traced her beginnings in Baghdad and Beirut, her student years at the Architectural Association, and the grand scale of her projects and personality. One talk carried the title "Would they call me a diva if I were a guy?: Being Zaha."

Rana attended and corrected the record from the floor. "I get really upset when I hear things that are not true. We all have our own perceptions of how things happen, and after someone dies, it becomes very easy to change it," she said.

She took over as chairman and trustee in 2025 from Brian Clarke, the artist and Hadid's close collaborator, who died in July last year. In 2020, the foundation had settled a four-year legal and personal battle over the architect's $133 million estate. "When Zaha passed away, I discovered that I was an executor and trustee of her estate. She had never told me that I was either of these, and straight after her passing, we just had to deal with all of the legal matters," Rana said.

What does the foundation hold?

The foundation encompasses 300,000 objects from Hadid's life: paintings, architectural models, sketchbooks, letters and her wardrobe, which includes pieces by Comme des Garçons and Yohji Yamamoto.

"Our greatest asset is the archive she left behind, and it goes beyond architecture. We can see the way that Zaha thought and how her methodology evolved, resulting in her designs and architecture," said Rana. She does not believe in a 10-year plan, but the next two years are spoken for, with international retrospectives in the works at major institutions and what she called "huge interest" in Hadid's paintings and wardrobe. "Zaha Hadid: Visionary Museum Designs" opens at Sir John Soane's Museum in London, running March 24 to June 20, 2027.

Rana wants the archive to travel as widely as the architecture. The foundation has been offered exhibitions in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East. "We will be going to Iraq," said Rana, who grew up in Beirut and has never visited the country but still "feels Iraqi."

"Zaha was first and foremost always Iraqi; she always credited the Iraqi part in her for who she was. She had a huge pride of place for Iraq," she said. Hadid cooked "the best leg of lamb, the Iraqi way, simmering over a fire for almost 20 hours" with rice, and Iraqi dialect slipped into her Arabic with colloquialisms like "Shaku maku?" (What's there? What's not there?)

Why a birthday party, on her terms?

Hadid's exuberance was well documented, and Rana planned the symposium by thinking like her aunt. "Zaha was really big on birthdays and she'd always like to make a big thing about her birthday. She would always say to me, 'I hated surprises and I hate someone throwing me a surprise birthday party, so I may as well assume it, invite everyone and be in control,'" Rana said. Friends and admirers attended, among them Hans Ulrich Obrist, Deyan Sudjic, Aric Chen and Francesco Vezzoli.

"Symbolically, it's been a very rough 10 years with legal disputes, and we've only been a foundation for four years," she explained. "To turn Zaha's office of 35 years into a foundation was very important to her because it was a former Victorian schoolhouse — and now people can come to learn and it serves everyone."

The refurbished headquarters now includes galleries, a learning space, a lecture hall and a collection display, hosting exhibitions, talks, workshops and creative residencies. Its inaugural show, "Zaha Hadid: Architecture of Performance," curated by Catherine Howe and Libby Sellers, traces the stage and set designs Hadid imagined for contemporary dance, classical opera and pop music.

Rana frames the foundation as a platform for Hadid's human network. "We've inherited a lot of friends, supporters and clients who became friends and family. Zaha had this amazing way of connecting with people and people loved her — without all of their help, we wouldn't be here today," she said. With retrospectives in motion and an Iraq exhibition on the horizon, the archive is set to move well beyond Clerkenwell.