It doesn’t even matter that Zaha Hadid's building The Peak Project wasn’t built because this painting is more than enough to convince us of Hadid’s design genius.

The fact that Hadid was a Pritzker Prize-winning architect, and a good enough painter to have works in MoMA’s permanent collection is just bananas. She had more talent in her manicured pinky finger, than most people do in their entire bodies. This painting is of a proposal for “a private health club in the hills of Kowloon, overlooking Hong Kong.” Hadid proposed that they get rid of the rocky hills that existed there and make their own mountain – a better mountain, one made of polished granite. “Excavated subterranean spaces, distinctive horizontal layers and floating voids [would] house the club’s various activities within a unique ‘geology,’ symbolizing the high life.” And as an added bonus, it looks like something out of "The Jetsons," which is always helpful. It was the winning design but was never actually built. For a while, Hadid was considered a “paper architect,” meaning that her work was too complicated to actually be built. This was the fault of the construction team, however, not Hadid. She’s perfect.

The influences on this structure are obvious… to the highly trained eye. “In dissecting landscape and structure into geometric forms and suggesting multiple viewpoints at once, Hadid reveals her interest in Russian Constructivism and Cubism, while the composition of fractured geometries demonstrates an approach known as ‘deconstructivist architecture.’” You would think that a building inspired by both Cubism and the rather alarming style of “deconstructivist architecture” would be as problematic as it was for, say, human faces, (just look at Weeping Woman with Handkerchief for reference) but it just made them look really cool, and kind of like they were moving through space really, really fast. It’s a shame that this club was never built, but at least we have the painting to commemorate all of the potential lavishness this proposal had to offer. Many a sci-fi movie will be worse off for lack of this as its setting.