The Hans Ulrich Obrist Archives opens its sixth chapter at LUMA Arles with I Think There Should Be No End to Experimentation, on view from May 1st, 2026 to March 31st, 2027. Marking ten years since Zaha Hadid’s passing, the exhibition revisits her legacy through today’s architectural lens, where drawing, geometry, and abstraction operate as tools for building space in thought, not just preparation for construction.
Curated as part of the Hans Ulrich Obrist Archives series, the exhibition frames Hadid as both architect and “paper architect”—an artist whose early visual language continues to shape how architecture is imagined today.
Drawings as laboratories of space and Suprematist geometry
At the centre of the exhibition are Zaha Hadid drawings—sketches, notebooks, axonometric studies, and layered acrylic works that act as open experiments rather than fixed plans. They reveal how she constructed spatial thinking long before digital modelling existed.
Shaped by Suprematist geometry and Constructivism, the drawings break away from stable perspective into diagonal forces, fractured grids, and shifting viewpoints. Line becomes motion; composition becomes architecture in potential.
Alongside archival materials and early notebooks, the works trace her path from abstraction to built form, linking early experiments to projects such as the Vitra Fire Station and later commissions in Marseille and Montpellier.
Zaha Hadid’s archive: from paper architecture to built environments
At LUMA Arles, Zaha Hadid’s archive is structured in three strands: Constructivist influence, early experimental work, and her long exchange with curator Hans Ulrich Obrist. These threads reveal a practice moving fluidly between drawing, architecture, and conversation.
Zaha’s “paper architecture” is presented not as unrealised work, but as a driving force of architectural thought, where form is tested through drawing before it reaches material form. Films, posters, and curatorial documents extend the archive into a layered portrait of continuous creative movement.
Installed in The Tower at Parc des Ateliers, designed by Frank Gehry, the exhibition reinforces Hadid’s vision of space as always in flux, never fixed.
Hans Ulrich Obrist Archives, Chapter 6: Zaha Hadid, ‘I Think There Should Be No End to Experimentation,’ 2026 – 2027, The Tower, ARCHIVES GALLERY and CHERRY TREE GALLERY, LUMA ARLES, France.
Photography courtesy of VICTOR&SIMON / GRÉGOIRE D’ABLON
