Zaha-Hadid

Bjarke Ingels’ CityWave closes the only multi-architect tower district Milan has built in half a century, 22 years after Arata Isozaki, Zaha Hadid and Daniel Libeskind won the 2004 masterplan for the 36.6-hectare former Fiera grounds. The question — every tower in the Milan CityLife towers district, by architect and completion year, 2015 to 2026 — has a clean answer because the consortium that won the competition imposed a clean rule: one signature tower per Pritzker-class author, then one residential complex per author, then a final phase by a single invited practice. Isozaki’s Allianz Tower delivered in 2015, Hadid’s Generali Tower in 2017, Libeskind’s PwC Tower in 2020, and BIG’s CityWave is nearly complete as of May 2026. That is the district. Everything else — the park, the metro stop, the residential blocks, the LEED Gold pre-certification on the office towers — is scaffolding around four projects by four authors. ...

Twenty-six summers, twenty-six architects, and one impossible brief — design a London building before you are allowed to design a London building. The Serpentine Pavilion architects, from Zaha Hadid in 2000 to Lanza Atelier in 2026, have together built the most reliable predictor in contemporary architecture of who will define the next decade of museums, biennales and pavilions. Read the commission as a long roster — Hadid, Libeskind, Toyo Ito with Cecil Balmond, Oscar Niemeyer, Álvaro Siza and Eduardo Souto de Moura, OMA, SANAA, Frank Gehry, Jean Nouvel, Peter Zumthor, Herzog & de Meuron with Ai Weiwei, Sou Fujimoto, Smiljan Radić, SelgasCano, BIG, Francis Kéré, Frida Escobedo, Junya Ishigami, Counterspace, Theaster Gates, Lina Ghotmeh, Mass Studies, Marina Tabassum, Lanza Atelier — and the line reads as a forward index to the next twenty Pritzkers, Venice directorships and global museum jobs. The pavilion does not predict the future; it commissions it. ...

On 1 May 2026, “Zaha Hadid: I Think There Should Be No End to Experimentation” opens at LUMA Arles in the Parc des Ateliers, Arles, France, running until Spring 2027. The zaha hadid paintings luma arles survey, curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist with Arthur Fouray and Lucas Jacques-Witz and produced with the Zaha Hadid Foundation, occupies The Tower, Archives Gallery and Cherry Tree Gallery inside Frank Gehry’s 56-metre stainless-steel pile and reframes every acrylic, ink wash and competition perspective Hadid produced between her 1977 AA thesis and the 2012 Heydar Aliyev Center as the operative drawings of her architecture, not its decoration. ...

Updated 2026-06-16 — added six architect-led Japanese collaborations we missed at first publication. Updated 2026-06-15 — sharpened the title and lede to front-load the five-name Milan Design Week 2026 architects roster (Ghotmeh, ZHA, Koolhaas, BBPR, Scandurra) and added a roster-at-a-glance H2 mapping every architect to their venue. Updated 2026-06-13 — added an H2 on Milan Design Week 2026 architects activating pre-war Milan: Gio Ponti’s 1929 Mulino Estate (Tom Dixon’s Mua Mua Hotel), the 1936 Pasticceria Cucchi (Marni residency) and the 4th-century Basilica di San Simpliciano (Gucci Memoria). ...