Last chance to absorb Zaha in full at MSU Broad

Is that a salt and pepper set or a prototype for a skyscraper in Stockholm? A cheese grater or a performing arts center?

When the designer is Zaha Hadid, you never know. 

The same fantastic play of undulating forms and gorgeous surface textures informs everything the visionary architect put her hands on, from a door handle to an automobile factory.

“Zaha Hadid Design: Untold,” at the MSU Broad Art Museum, is one of the cultural highlights of 2022 in greater Lansing. The museum celebrated its 10th birthday by offering a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see a dazzling variety of objects thought up by Hadid in a building she designed.

But the window to the full Zaha experience is closing.

Most of the exhibit will continue through Feb. 12, 2023, but the second-floor portion closes at the end of the day Sunday.

Although Hadid died in 2016, she managed to seed the world with pulsating, dynamic structures like the rippling London Aquatics Centre, the glittering Guangzhou Opera House in China, the whiplashing Sheikh Zayed Bridge in Abu Dhabi and, of course, the metal-winged Broad, a trapezoidal jewelry box that crouches across from the commercial strip along Grand River Avenue in East Lansing.

The exhibit dramatically demonstrates that there is an underlying method to the breathtaking variety of forms and concepts Hadid and her studio conceived, on whatever scale they were realized, from a finger ring to an opera house.

The exhibit also takes great pains to link the objects on display to the principles and methods used to design and construct the Broad itself. 

A second-floor highlight of the exhibit is a gallery set up as a complete room, from the rug to tables and chairs to light fixtures, all designed by Hadid. In another second-floor gallery, a large-screen video shows the physical work required to bring many of Hadid’s designs into reality, from petal-like vases to a table that rises from the floor like a tangle of lily pads. Even the chairs set up for visitors to sit and watch the film are curvy, modular shapes you can fit together or pull apart.

The second floor also features a virtual reality headset that takes you to a prototype house designed by Hadid.

What’s left after the second floor closes will still be eye-popping, but anyone who wants to soak in a full tub of Zaha had better hurry.