Desley Luscombe, Emeritus Professor of Architecture at the University of Technology Sydney, Australia, has produced the first book on Zaha Hadid’s paintings, a very important and lesser-known aspect of the great Iraqi-born architect’s work. Like other masters of architecture, Hadid used these paintings as design tools.

Zaha Hadid’s paintings, Imagining Architecture focuses on the relationship between painting—strongly inspired by Suprematism—and the development of Hadid’s visionary design, where she used abstraction as an investigative method to imagine architecture. During the first twenty years of her career, she became known precisely for this “paper architecture”: projects exhibited in shows and published in various architecture journals, yet largely unbuilt.

The book examines a selection of paintings in detail, critically assessing them within the broader context of 20th-century art, relating them to Suprematism, De Stijl, Cubism, and Futurism. Moreover, despite being created just before the transition in architecture from hand drawing to computers, many of Hadid’s paintings prefigure the potential of digital and virtual reality.

Opening image: Zaha Hadid Architects 59 Eaton Place, Three Towers: the Flamboyant, the Suprematist, the Clinical London, United Kingdom, 1981 © Zaha Hadid Foundation