Zaha Hadid, considered by many to be today's hottest international architect, has been selected to do the preliminary design for the Haymarket expansion of the Sheldon Museum of Art.

Associates from Hadid's London-based firm, Zaha Hadid Architects, will be in Lincoln on Thursday to present the initial design to University of Nebraska-Lincoln officials, including Sheldon Director J. Daniel Veneciano, representatives of the chancellor's office and the University of Nebraska Foundation.

The associates hand-carried models of Hadid's proposed building for the presentation. Final designs will be made public early next year, if fundraising for the expansion is successful.

As previously announced, the new building will be at Ninth and S streets in space now occupied by the University of Nebraska Press warehouse. No start date for the project has been set. It will not be completed before the end of 2011.

Money to pay for the building will come entirely from donations.

Veneciano has seen what he called rough designs for the new museum.

"It has the curvatures of Zaha's work," he said. "It's not a boxlike structure. What intrigues me about it is it kind of combines a futuristic architectural sense with a kind of, what I call, pioneer architecture.

"It calls to the future and looks to the past in some ways. But it interprets the past in a forward-looking way."

The footprint of the new building will be slightly smaller than the warehouse it would replace, but it will be twice as tall, at four floors the same height as the hotel being planned for the adjoining property.

Hadid is on the forefront of architecture today, designing buildings around the world, winning the most prestigious prizes and garnering accolades as the leader of a new generation of architects. As such, she succeeds the likes of Frank Gehry, designer of the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles.

"She's a contemporary Picasso of architecture," said Steve Hardy, a University of Nebraska-Lincoln architecture professor who moved here just more than a year ago from London, where he knew Hadid.

"This would definitely be the most important contemporary building in Lincoln."

Hadid, who is designing the London 2012 Olympic Aquatics Centre, responded to a request for proposals for the expansion earlier this year along with other top international firms, including Diller Scofidio + Renfro of New York and Colombia's Giancarlo Mazzanti. She is working with Nebraska's DLR Group on the proposal.

Hadid was selected for several reasons that link to the university and Sheldon, Veneciano said.

First, Veneciano said, it is important to note that the university campus is home to two museums designed by top architects: Sheldon was designed by Philip Johnson, and the International Quilt Study Center and Museum was designed by Robert Stern, a student of Johnson's.

Johnson won the first Pritzker Architecture Prize, the Nobel Prize of architecture, in 1979. In 2004, Hadid became the first, and so far, only woman to win the Pritzker. This year, she received the Praemium Imperiale for architecture. Another Nobel-type award, Praemium Imperiale is presented to artists in painting, sculpture, architecture, music and film/theater.

The artistic connection with Hadid's work was critical to her selection, Veneciano said.

"The Sheldon museum is a work of art," he said. "It's a masterpiece building by Philip Johnson. In my opinion, it's the most elegantly designed museum in the country and, probably for that reason, the most beautiful. It's a work of art. So the logic in doing this is that the architect is an artist and what she will deliver is a work of art."

Among Hadid's most acclaimed buildings is the Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati, which has a corner location like the proposed Sheldon expansion but is angular in design.

She is designing the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University in East Lansing. Groundbreaking for that museum financed by a $26 million endowment from the Broads, internationally known art collectors, is set for next year.

The original budget for the new Sheldon museum was $12.5 million, the approximate cost of retrofitting the old warehouse building.

"What we're now able to do with an architect with Zaha Hadid's stature is exceed that somewhat," Veneciano said. The final estimated cost of the proposed Sheldon expansion will not be known until designs are complete. Veneciano and the foundation are raising money now.

Because of the need to find donors and raise millions, a completion date has not been set.

"There's not a deadline for it," Veneciano said. "We have had a projected timeline. We're still in the fundraising period of that timeline. It projects completion by the end of 2011. With an inventive architect like Zaha, we can see allotting more time."

Veneciano said he is confident the expansion will happen, providing a new entryway to Lincoln featuring a building by one of the world's top architects.

"It is too important a project to not complete," he said. "Given the architect at this time, the project is now too dynamic, too exciting to let go. ...In my opinion, this will be the most important building in Lincoln since the Sheldon."

Reach L. Kent Wolgamott at 473-7244 or kwolgamott@journalstar.com.