By Desley Luscombe

Architectural Association alumnus Zaha Hadid is widely regarded as a visionary architect, and was globally acclaimed at the time of her untimely death in 2016. During the first twenty years of her career, she earned her reputation through ‘paper architecture’: projects which were widely published in architecture journals and exhibited, but which remained largely unbuilt. Influenced by the Suprematists, she used her paintings as design tools and abstraction as an investigative structure for imagining architecture. Drawing extensively on interviews with Hadid's contemporaries and her team of assistants and her past presentations and in-depth interviews, this book is the first to focus on this important aspect of Hadid’s work.