New work from the late Zaha Hadid continues to emerge after her death two and a half months ago, a testament to her prolific and groundbreaking career as an architect and a designer.
One of Hadid’s last projects was designing a retrospective of German Dada artist Kurt Schwitters’ work for Galerie Gmurzynska in Zurich, now open through September 30. The exhibit is titled "Merz" after the artist’s legendary living collage sculpture "Merzbau," which was created in his Hanover workspace between 1923 and 1937 and destroyed in 1943 in an Allied bombing raid.
The Merzbau inspired Hadid to design the exhibit also as a kind of collage, displaying 70 of Schwitter’s major works and other artifacts among her own furniture and design collections. Schwitter’s paintings, collages, and sculptures are placed around Hadid’s swooping and curving tables, chairs, and other objects, establishing an open dialogue between the two visionaries. Take a look around.
A retrospective of Zaha Hadid’s own work is currently on display at the Venice Architecture Biennale.
Meanwhile, as part of a larger exhibition of Hadid’s product design at Design Miami, the architect’s sculptural plastic Kuki chair has been relaunched in a carbon fiber version. While the original chair was made by folding a single round sheet of plastic, this new iteration uses a special carbon fiber composite material called Hypetex originally created by Formula One engineers for cars.
To fashion the chair, the material is folded along two vertical lines leaving a space between the two edges in the back, then creased horizontally at a 90 degree angle in the center of the piece, creating a seat and a backrest.