Fluid vision

In the late 1990s, when Cincinnati's Contemporary Arts Center was seeking an architect to design its new, high-visibility museum, it considered a proposal from Zaha Hadid, the Baghdad-born, London-based architect who is being honored Saturday night with the Philadelphia Museum of Art's Collab Design Excellence Award. Hadid had completed only a few commissions at the time and her potent, generative architecture, which appears at once prehistoric and space age, was relatively unknown in the United States.

The sculptor Michele Oka Doner, whose Lexicon: Justice is installed in the lobby of the Philadelphia Criminal Justice Center, was brought to Cincinnati as they considered Hadid's proposal. "I'll never forget," she recalls, "there was a man there and he said to me, 'She's a real curiosity, isn't she?' "

"Well, I took him to task," Doner says. "I went to battle. I knew she was more than a curiosity. She was a force to be reckoned with."

Hadid received the Cincinnati commission and the museum, still her most important work in the United States, opened in 2003. A year later she won the Pritzker Prize, given annually to an architect of singular vision and accomplishment.

Among the so-called starchitects - globetrotting designers who build high-profile projects - Hadid presents the most far-reaching and transformative vision for the human landscape. "She pushes the limit," says Kathy Hiesinger, the Philadelphia Museum of Art's curator of post-1700 European decorative arts and the curator of "Zaha Hadid: Form in Motion," presented by Collab in the Perelman building. "She has invented her own formal language. She's not afraid to make shapes that have not existed in architecture before."

"Form in Motion," the first U.S. show of Hadid's product and furniture designs to be exhibited within a space of her invention at the Perelman, is ostensibly meant to reveal Hadid's talent and vision as a product designer. There are jewelry, light fixtures, furniture, shoes, even a car designed for the British art collector Kenny Schachter. But it's really the Hadid world in miniature. "You can stand here and see the connections between the architecture and the objects," says Hiesinger.