Before Frédéric Flamand became a well-known choreographer and artistic director of the National Ballet of Marseille France’s second national ballet company, he worked mainly in unconventional spaces: factories, swimming pools churches. But 10 years ago, when Mr. Flamand’s company at the time Charleroi/Danses in Belgium, began gaining recognition and received invitations to perform on more conventional stages at festivals throughout Europe, he had to find a way to turn the stage into the unconventional space his work demanded. The solution? Mr Flamand turned to the ultimate disciples of design: architects.

He had little trouble finding willing participants. To date, Mr. Flamand’s collaborators include some of the most innovative, high-profile architects working today, from Jean Nouvel to Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio, the design team now recasting the Lincoln Center complex.

Mr. Flamand’s latest cohort for his “Metapolis II,” a meditation on the complexity of contemporary city life, which opens Wednesday as part of the Lincoln Center Festival, is perhaps his most illustrious to date: Zaha Hadid. In 2004, Ms. Hadid was the first female to receive the Pritzker Prize and last summer she was the subject of a major retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum.

For Mr. Flamand, one reason to work with architects as set designers was the intriguing similarities of their separate crafts. All choreographers, regardless of style or subject, are interested in how they can use bodies to carve shapes and stories into space. Just as they transform space with bodies, architects design buildings that transform and landscapes.

“We can imagine that each dancer also creates architecture in space. A body makes an ephemeral architecture,” Mr. Flamand said in French-accented English. “And it’s very interesting to see the ephemeral architecture created by the body next to the real sense of space created from the real architecture.”

Besides, Mr. Flamand said, the collaboration provides benefits to architects not usually enjoyed in their standard practices. “They get to see immediately what works and what doesn’t,” he said. “They see how the body of the dancer reacts to the space they’ve created.”

Ms. Hadid, born in Baghdad and known for futuristic designs such as the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center, designed set and costumes that are sleek and simple, yet, like the landscape of any city, ever-changing. Throughout “Metapolis II,” the dancers subtly shift three silvery bridges, made of fiberglass and aluminium, to create new shapes and structures. As the backdrop, projected upon a screen that covers the entire back wall, images of the same dancers who move onstage traverse the wall as giant versions of themselves. These larger-than-life dancers are clad in chroma key costumes upon which further cityscapes are projected. Tokyo, Barcelona, Fifth Avenue, and more, dance across the screen in the form of the dancers’ bodies they inhabit.

“We try to create with dance and video and structures a space that is fluid and abrupt and has its own rhythm like a city,” Mr. Flamand said. “It’s a little like traveling in a car in the city: First it’s very hectic in the downtown, everyone running in business suits, then you get to Central Park and everything is calm.”

The work’s challenges extended to Mr. Flamand’s role as well. “Metapolis II” is an adaptation of an earlier work, “Metapolis,” which Ms. Hadid and Mr. Flamand created for Charleroi/Danses in 2000. Although the set and costumes, also by Ms. Hadid and ranging from one-legged leather suits to near-nakedness, remain the same, the cast has changed dramatically.

What were originally 11 contemporary dancers of Charleroi/Danses have become the 19 classically trained dancers of the National Ballet of Marseille. For “Metapolis II,” Mr. Flamand faced the challenge of hybridizing his avant-garde contemporary style with the classical technique of Marseille’s dancers.

“Because the thematic is nonending, we can continue to change and adapt this work,” said David Hayo, an assistant to Mr. Flamand in Marseille who was among the original cast of “Metapolis.” “It is like these are new inhabitants. The city stays the same, but there are new people living in it.”

In reality, though, “Metapolis II” has traveled to many cities, from Marseille to Beirut to Edinburgh, and beyond. “Whenever you travel, a city itself hopefully has some impact on the dancers, how they react and feel in that city,” Mr. Hayo, who spoke from his own experiences, said. “‘Metapolis II’ is still played in a theater situation, so it’s not so much that the theater has an impact on the performance, but it’s rather the other way around,” he said. “That the seemingly simple elements we created strongly impact the theater itself.”

Until July 27 (Lincoln Center, 212-721-6500).