Zaha Hadid Foundation Art, Design & Culture
A new home online for Zaha Hadid’s foundation and its archive
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zhfoundation.comThe Zaha Hadid Foundation is dedicated to the legacy of the architect and her commitment to education and experimentation across architecture and related disciplines. It holds an archive of more than 300,000 objects in London.
The Foundation’s WordPress site no longer matched the scale of its exhibitions, research and learning programme, and a new identity from Experimental Jetset was on the way. We were commissioned to lead the information architecture, user experience and build of a new site, and to carry that identity onto screen.
A new chapter, told clearly
The site sets out what the Foundation does, then lets exhibitions, research and learning each carry their own programme.
The brief asked us to reposition the Foundation for a new chapter: a clear account of its purpose and activities, simpler navigation, and a system that keeps up with exhibitions, events and learning. We designed the experience around content, navigation and information architecture first, and brought the visual expression in on top, so the identity supports how people use the site.
Distortion with rules
Experimental Jetset’s identity is defined by how it behaves as much as how it looks, so we wrote rules for where it moves.
The logo responds to interaction, and distortion varies in intensity with context. It appears in hero moments, transitions and the identity itself, and typography distorts more than imagery. Most of the interface stays calm and legible, so the contrast between order and disruption carries the impact. Distortion is applied to the Foundation’s own elements and never to archival material: Zaha Hadid’s work stays as she made it.
Highlights from 300,000 objects
The archive is vast and only partly digitised, so the site shows its highlights instead of attempting the whole collection.
We built flexible content components for exhibitions, collections and the programme, on Next.js with Storyblok, and kept the editorial model as simple as a small team needs. Content moves across from WordPress into the new structure.
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