Zaha Hadid Foundation Clerkenwell Opening: Her Former Studio Becomes a Free Public Gallery

The Zaha Hadid Foundation Clerkenwell opening happened quietly, without a ribbon or a celebrity queue. On Tuesday 3 November, the red-brick schoolhouse at 10 Bowling Green Lane — the building where Zaha Hadid ran her practice for more than 30 years — opened its doors to anyone who wanted to walk in, free of charge (Made in Shoreditch). Ten years after her death, her old office is now a gallery, a lecture hall and a home for her archive.

Information verified through 5 November 2026.

What the Zaha Hadid Foundation Clerkenwell opening actually gives London

This is not a shrine. The refurbished building holds galleries, a learning space, a lecture hall and a display of the collection, with room left over for talks, workshops and creative residencies (Architects’ Journal). Plans for the site were first revealed in 2022, framed as a “gallery, museum, learning centre, research facility and think-tank” — an ambitious list for a Victorian schoolhouse, but the building has absorbed ambitious uses before.

Hadid first rented a single classroom here in 1983. The practice grew room by room until it took the whole building, and it stayed for over three decades before moving to Goswell Road five years ago (Architects’ Journal). That history matters to what the place feels like now. You are not visiting a neutral white box built to honour her. You are visiting the rooms where the work was actually made.

Entry is free, Tuesday to Saturday, 11am to 6pm (Made in Shoreditch). For a city where major exhibitions routinely cost the price of a decent lunch, free entry is a statement about who this archive belongs to.

Inside the 10 Bowling Green Lane refurbishment

London practice Studio KA, led by Katherine Nolan and Alex Butterworth, handled the refurbishment of the Grade II-listed schoolhouse, built in the early 1870s (London Post). The approach was light-touch and, in places, archaeological. Original features have been restored, a fireplace and arched doorways reopened, and the main spaces opened up to improve circulation (Architects’ Journal).

What Studio KA chose not to erase tells you the most. Hadid’s own interventions stay: the Z-shaped door pulls, the shard-like flooring insets she had installed when this was a working studio (FAD Magazine). New flooring and finishes draw on colours found in her paintings, so the building carries her palette without turning into a themed attraction (London Post). Zaha Hadid Design, which makes furniture and objects from her designs, remains based in the building.

The risk with any architect’s house-museum is embalming — freezing a restless practice at the moment of death. Keeping her door handles while reworking the plan for school groups and residents is a decent answer to that risk. The building is allowed to keep working.

A first show about stages, not towers: the Zaha Hadid Architecture of Performance exhibition

The opening exhibition is a surprise, and a smart one. Zaha Hadid: Architecture of Performance, curated by Catherine Howe with guest curator Libby Sellers, is the Foundation’s first collection-based show, and it is devoted to stage and set design rather than her famous buildings (FAD Magazine).

The show traces five projects across 25 years. It starts with lines taped across a ballroom floor for a 1989 collaboration with choreographer Rosemary Butcher, moves through stage environments for the Metapolis Ballet and the Music Video Pavilion in Groningen, and reaches her modular stage for the Pet Shop Boys’ Nightlife world tour of 1999–2000 — ramps, projection surfaces, removable panels, plus a concert film running about 33 minutes (Made in Shoreditch). It ends with her 2014 reimagining of Mozart’s Così fan tutte for the Los Angeles Philharmonic at Walt Disney Concert Hall (FAD Magazine). The exhibition runs until 27 March 2027.

A second gallery holds The Rebar Beneath, an 11-minute dual-channel video work by the multidisciplinary artist LionHeart, made after time spent inside Hadid’s archive and open until April 2027 (Architects’ Journal). In the foyer, illustrator Mona Chalabi’s timeline, The Completely Exhausting Inexhaustibility of Zaha Hadid, maps a life that spilled across architecture, furniture, fashion and education (FAD Magazine).

A legacy the Foundation wants kept in motion

The reopening was preceded by 89 Degrees of Zaha Hadid, a two-day symposium on 30 and 31 October run with the Architectural Association and Serpentine across three venues, with more than 40 speakers; the second day would have been Hadid’s 76th birthday (FAD Magazine). The title comes from her 1983 painting The World (89 Degrees).

Rana Hadid, chair of the trustees, describes the mission plainly: “It was Zaha’s wish for the Foundation to preserve her legacy while carrying her ideas forward: advancing education, supporting future generations and contributing to the wider field of architecture” (London Post). Director Aric Chen puts the emphasis on use, not reverence — the archive as a starting point for new voices and emerging talent, not just a record of a finished career (London Post).

Analysis: London already has a Hadid building that never opened. She bought the former Design Museum building at Shad Thames in 2013 to house her archive; it holds most of her drawings, models and paintings, yet it never opened to the public (Architects’ Journal). Bowling Green Lane is the correction. A free, working, slightly hard-to-find schoolhouse — visitors are advised to look for the small girls’ entrance — beats a sealed vault every time. If the residencies and learning programmes actually fill these rooms, the Foundation will have done the hardest thing in architecture culture: kept a dead architect’s workplace alive by letting other people work in it.

Photo: Chris Wood, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Sources

1. https://www.architectsjournal.co.uk/buildings/zaha-hadid-foundation-opens-former-clerkenwell-hq-to-the-public
2. https://london-post.co.uk/zaha-hadid-foundation-begins-new-chapter/
3. https://fadmagazine.com/2026/10/27/zaha-hadid-foundation-london-reopening/
4. https://madeinshoreditch.co.uk/2026/11/05/zaha-hadids-former-studio-on-bowling-green-lane-in-clerkenwell-has-opened-to-the-public-as-the-zaha-hadid-foundation-with-a-free-show-of-her-stage-sets-for-the-pet-shop-boys/