Zaha Hadid

Zaha Hadid, in full Dame Zaha Hadid, Iraqi-born British architect known for her radical deconstructivist designs. In 2004 she became the first woman to be awarded the Pritzker Architecture Prize.
In February 2016, the month preceding her death, she became the first and only woman to be awarded the Royal Gold Medal from the Royal Institute of British Architects.”

Hadid was born on 31 October 1950 in Baghdad, Iraq, to an upper-class Iraqi family. Hadid’s father Muhammad al-Hajj Husayn Hadid was a wealthy industrialist and politician. Her mother Wajiha al-Sabunji was an artist. Hadid mentioned in an interview how her early childhood trips to the ancient Sumerian cities in southern Iraq sparked her interest in architecture. Hadid attended the American University in Beirut, Lebanon where she earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics. In 1972 she traveled to London to study at the Architectural Association, a major center of progressive architectural thought during the 1970s. She met Elia Zenghelis and Rem Koolhaas there, with whom she would collaborate as a partner at the Office of Metropolitan Architecture. In 1979, Zaha Hadid established her own company, Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA) in London.”

Hadid’s fluid undulating design for the Heydar Aliyev Center, a cultural center that opened in 2012 in Baku, Azerbaijan, won the London Design Museum’s Design of the Year in 2014. She was the first woman to earn that award. “Her other notable works included the London Aquatics Centre built for the 2012 Olympics; the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, which opened in 2012 at Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan; and the Jockey Club Innovation Tower (2014) for the Hong Kong Polytechnic University.”

Zaha Hadid works in an industry dominated by men, which makes her extraordinary achievements are even more extraordinary. She was often subjected to controversies that her male counterparts were not. The expense and scale of many of her design projects were frequently ridiculed. Especially the protests from famous Japanese architects led her to scrap her plan altogether for the New National Stadium for the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo.

Upon Zaha Hadid’s death in 2016, Hadid’s studio reported, “Zaha Hadid was widely regarded to be the greatest female architect in the world today.” The Guardian described her as the “Queen of the curve,” who “liberated architectural geometry, giving it a whole new expressive identity.”

References:

“Biography: Zaha Hadid | The Pritzker Architecture Prize”. Pritzkerprize.Com, 2020, https://www.pritzkerprize.com/biography-zaha-hadid.

Hadid, Zaha. “Zaha Hadid Biography, Life & Quotes”. The Art Story, 2020, https://www.theartstory.org/artist/hadid-zaha/life-and-legacy/.

“Zaha Hadid | Biography, Buildings, & Facts”. Encyclopedia Britannica, 2020, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Zaha-Hadid.