Have a Zaha Hadid weekend!

Opening today for a three-month run at London’s Barbican, Hamlet Hail to the Thief is a kinetic, musical, theatrical marriage – you might say mash-up – of a 2003 Radiohead album and Shakespeare’s play. Premiered in 2025, with brief runs in Manchester and Stratford, it comprises 27 scenes, with a running time of 90 to 100 minutes and action soundtracked by Yorke’s jigsawed versions of the Hail to the Thief album’s 14 songs.

Yorke, ever the iconoclast, described the show to Craig McLean: ‘It moves at a fast pace. It’s not four hours. It doesn't have long soliloquies where you can go to sleep, wake up again, you’ve still not missed anything...’ He caught himself and smiled. ‘Um...Did I say that?’

He did indeed, and a lot more besides, when, over lunch break at rehearsals, McLean sat down with Yorke and co-directors Steven Hoggett and Christine Jones to discuss the third and biggest outing for their innovative show.

Intrigued by where creatives live? Artists’ Modernist Houses, a new book from publisher Batsford, takes us on a fascinating journey across scales and territories in the midcentury movement, looking at homes around the world ‘which are or have been lived in by artists’. Authored by Wallpaper* contributor and former staffer Harriet Thorpe, it compiles 50 examples – from Georgia O’Keeffe’s ranch in New Mexico to the Bauhaus Masters’ Houses in Germany, and the studio and houses of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera in Mexico City (pictured).

‘I’ve always loved visiting artists’ house museums, where the aura of the artist remains, absorbed through their personal objects [such as] notebooks and sketches, [and] their daily views and working processes. I feel like in those kinds of rooms you can really start to understand an artist on a deeper level,’ Thorpe tells Ellie Stathaki. She describes working on the book as a journey of discovery into the ‘relationship between modern art and modern architecture in the 20th century’. It’s also a great excuse for some house tours.

‘This is a man who is almost perfectly visual,’ said the writer and painter Etel Adnan of her friend Robert Wilson. The renowned artist and theatremaker, who died last year at the age of 83, was a designer at heart. He thought by drawing, painted with light, and sculpted time and space with silence. Yet Wilson was also a Texas-born teller of tales. He overcame a childhood stutter to hone a speaking voice that shared the captivating, expansive, and finely calibrated character of his work for the stage.

Wilson’s dreamlike certainty and disarming charisma take on a new form in his highly anticipated memoir from Penguin Press. Written with actor and author Keith McDermott, The Space Behind the Face unfolds in stories arrayed according to the three traditional ways that artists construct space: portrait, still life, and landscape. ‘When we started it, I was thinking chronologically,’ McDermott tells Stephanie Murg. ‘Well, that wouldn’t work with Bob. In our discussions, he just wouldn’t stay on subject, and I cringed whenever I heard my own voice on the tapes, interrupting and saying, “But don’t forget…” I realised that as Texans, we’re storytellers. We’re loquacious. He often went into Texas twang mode when telling some of these stories.’

Architect Norman Foster switched scale this week and revealed his watch-design debut, with a pair of timepieces for independent watchmaker Lebond. ‘I have always been interested in the relationship between design, engineering and precision, and a watch brings all of those things together in a very small and personal object,’ he says. The watches’ cases, one in matte black, the other in micro-sanded matte metallic, are both made from Grade 5 titanium, and feature integrated straps.