After its past exhibitions on Frank Gehry, Richard Meier,and Michael Graves, next on the Philadelphia Museum of Art's list ofstarchitects-turned-designers to showcase is Zaha Hadid. A collection of objects, shoes, furniture, and jewelry by the Pritzker Prize winner, entitled "Zaha Hadid: Form in Motion," is on display through March 25, 2012.

Presented in a space designed by Hadid's own team, helmed by senior project manager Woody Yao, "Formin Motion" includes sculptural walls and floors of repeated, undulating graphicpatterns. The setting is just another piece of the continuous, fluid line of Hadid's body of work, a shared curvilinear language apparentin each of the objects on display. 

"It all really fits together as a kind of environmentalsculpture," curator Kathryn Bloom Hiesinger told ARTINFO. "The curves are basedon actually quite complicated geometries. They swoop and move, and this is truenot only of her buildings or the installation, but also of her products."

In addition to creating the environment that houses theobjects, Hadid and her team played a large role in both curating and placingthem within the space — not a usual thing for Hiesinger, who was given "carteblanche" from Gehry to arrange his exhibition as she pleased. It was a "give and take" between Hiesinger and the Hadid team based on what objects fitbest into the environment. The firm treated the space as a site plan and the objects as theirbuildings, which their forms certainly echo.

The installation features work that dates back to 1995, but the majority showcases Hadid's most recent pieces, from 2006 on. Both the Z Chair, which wasreleased this year at the Milan Furniture Fair, and the Zephyr Sofa, which was shown in 2010 at the Galerie Gmurzynska in Zurich, are making their American debut. In addition to theirunifying curvilinear language, many of the piecesshare the same high-tech manufacturing process which Hadid was very early toembrace — "digital-to-production manufacturing," where a designprogrammed into a computer can be carved into a material by lasers in asingle process (Murray Moss's current installations at London's Victoria& Albert Museum are other examples of the technique).

The environment Hadid designed was a "heroic effort" in itself,according to Hiesinger. Since the museum did not have the means for digital-to-production manufacturing, itoutsourced the walls to a company in Brooklyn that did. Blocks of polystyrene were hot wire cut, sanded, and painted in New York, then shipped to Philadelphia in pieces, where they wereassembled with the help of the museum's own carpentry staff.

Hiesinger is excited to show Hadid's range of abilities — an intersection of fashion,design, and architecture. "She says she never loses anything," Hiesinger toldARTINFO. "I've discovered that thinking and working about her — that ideas shemight have early on pop up and recur. That's what's so exciting about her.Everything is connected.”

Hiesinger highlighted a few of her favorite Hadid pieces from the exhibition. To see the objects and read her commentary, click the slide show to the left.