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.

The studio – and this volume – was divided into ten segments, addressing such issues as program analysis, spatialities, system conditions, current contemporary art centers, building types, sites, and linearities. Each segment is represented by strikingly original renderings, including many fantastical computer images. The accompanying text is drawn from transcripts of the studio reviews by the prestigious critics: Robert A. M. Stern, dean of the Yale School of Architecture; Terence Riley and Paola Antonelli of the Museum of Modern Art; and architects, critics, and scholars Jeffrey Kipnis, Thomas Krens, Sulan Kolatan, William MacDonald, Fabian Marcaccio, Rebeca Mendez, Paola Sanguinetti, Joseph Giovannini, Marc Cousins, Greg Lynn, and Gail Witwer.