In spring 2000, as the Eero Saarinen Visiting Professor at Yale University, Zaha Hadid led an intense and wildly creative studio on the topic of the contemporary art center. Such centers are proliferating across the United States and around the world; yet their architectural form remains abstract and open-ended, subject to continual reinterpretation. Hadid’s studio -- one leader, three studio assistants, twelve students, and numerous critics -- interpreted the contemporary art center as an invitation to experiment with new forms of public space. Specific contemporary works of art became the program for a series of radical architectural concepts that expand the space of the art, taking on the scale and materiality of full-scale architectural constructs.
