It’s hard to imagine that the Guangzhou site seemed particularly promising when she first saw it. The project stands at the edge of a vast, featureless park that is the centerpiece of the district’s master plan, about a 15-minute drive from the old city center. An enormous library, a kitschy masonry building intended to resemble an open book, faces it across the park to the east; a 103-story tinted-glass tower stands directly behind it, dwarfing the few people passing by on the streets below.

But the beauty of Ms. Hadid’s design stems partly from the skill with which she knits her forms into this insipid context. Approaching from the park, visitors climb a grand staircase or follow a long ramp that angles diagonally past a small, secondary performance space before arriving at an entry plaza in front of the main hall. The hall’s contoured granite and glass form angles out over the plaza. The smaller hall, about half the size, stands like a big dark boulder slightly back and to the right.

The two structures shape a series of paths through and around the site. Visitors can slip between the halls, for instance, and down a staircase to a narrow roadway in back, or they can follow a wide concrete ramp that splinters off from this path and spirals down to a smaller outdoor plaza framed by a reflecting pool and a few shops. Other paths return you to the park or out to the main street.

For some the plazas will conjure the alienating public spaces found in de Chirico paintings and Antonioni films. And one of Ms. Hadid’s aims over the years has been to rehabilitate those kinds of empty expanses, which went out of favor in the 1970s and ’80s. The difference is in her ability to convey a sense of bodies in motion. The design here is never static; there isn’t the oppressive sense of control found in some classical architecture, with its rigid perpendicular lines. At some points the curves of the paths create a sense of acceleration, propelling you forward; at others they create intimate pockets in which to loiter. Everywhere you turn, unexpected routes open up, so the architecture never feels manipulative.