Turn the clock back to 1999 and you find Zaha Hadid and her partner Patrik Schumacher working on a critical set of projects, four of which (including MAXXI) eventually got built and two that never moved off the page or computer screen. Reacting against the notion of buildings as sculptural objects — popularized at the time by Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao — Hadid and Schumacher explored the possibility of designing buildings as fields or networks of elements and connections. From a car factory and a transit hub to different kinds of museums, these projects imagine architecture as a three-dimensional fabric woven and layered in ways that emphasize movement and interaction. To understand these projects, you need to look at them individually as expressions of interconnectivity, and collectively as a family of designs sharing similar beliefs and quirks.