Published for the first exhibition on the enormously influential Iraqi British architect Zaha Hadid (1950–2016) to take place in Latin America (at Mexico City’s Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo), Design as Second Nature focuses on the creative processes behind Hadid’s projects, with emphasis on models, paintings, photographs and films by Hadid and others made in preparation or taken as inspiration for buildings. This concise overview also examines the ongoing work of Hadid’s firm and design studio, Zaha Hadid Architects, emphasizing its guiding ethos of “design as second nature”―the mimicking of organic processes of growth and biomorphism in architectural design, or “bio-mimetics”―and attendant new engineering paradigms such as “tectonism.” The catalog features texts by Zaha Hadid Architects Director Patrik Schumacher, who elaborates on the titular analogy with nature, as well as by Shajay Bhooshan, Pilar Echezarreta, Felipe Leal, Marcos Mazari and Francisco Serrano.