Defined by a timeline of ZHA formative works in China, ‘ZHA Close Up’ at MAM Shanghai explores the pioneering research and interconnecting relationships that unite their projects around the globe, detailing the technological innovations that are transforming how the studio imagines, designs and constructs built environments.

As the first exhibition of ZHA in mainland China, with a retrospective display of projects dating from 1982 to today, it examines the evolution of ZHA’ buildings over the last 40 years—from the flowing urban spaces of the MAXXI Museum of 21st Century Art in Rome (2010) and Leeza SOHO in Beijing (2019) to the studio’s ground-breaking projects currently in development across six continents—demonstrating a consistent desire to innovate and inspire.

ZHA’s competition-winning design for the Peak Club in Hong Kong (1982-1983) manifests Hadid’s investigations into the fluid relationships between building and site, interior and exterior, architecture and engineering. Defined by the topography of the surrounding mountainside, in this and later seminal projects such as the Guangzhou Opera House (2010) and Beijing Daxing International Airport (2019), ZHA’s work echoes the coherence of the nature in an organic architectural language generating unrivalled spatial experiences that are intuitive to navigate and recognised around the world.

‘ZHA Close Up’ explores the journey of four decades of experimentation that are inscribed within ZHA’s architecture and has seen their designs become more spatially inventive, more structurally efficient, more technologically advanced and more environmentally sensitive with each new design and positions their work at the forefront of architectural practice.

Showcasing projects that have received highest honours from civic, professional and academic institutions worldwide, ‘ZHA Close Up’ presents the studio’s pioneering research to improve how the industry designs and constructs.