Zaha Hadid

For a long time Zaha Hadid designed projects considered impossible to build. With the Vitra Fire Station, MAXXI in Rome and the Heydar Aliyev Center in Baku she became the world’s best-known woman architect and the first woman to receive the Pritzker Prize.

Zaha Hadid was born in 1950 in Baghdad into a well-to-do family. She studied mathematics at the American University of Beirut and then architecture at the Architectural Association in London, where Rem Koolhaas and Elia Zenghelis were her teachers. After graduating in 1977 she worked at their office, OMA. She opened her own office in London in 1980. She became known for paintings and drawings inspired by the Russian Suprematists, in which buildings shatter and float through space.

In 1983 Hadid won the competition for The Peak in Hong Kong, which was never built. Her first building was the fire station at Vitra in Weil am Rhein, 1993, with sharp concrete planes. It was followed by, among others, the Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati, the BMW central building in Leipzig, Phaeno in Wolfsburg, MAXXI in Rome, the Guangzhou Opera House, the London Aquatics Centre for the 2012 Olympics and the Heydar Aliyev Center in Baku. With her colleague Patrik Schumacher she developed a parametric architecture of flowing forms.

Hadid received the Pritzker Prize in 2004, the first woman to do so, and the Royal Institute of British Architects’ Gold Medal in 2016. She died unexpectedly in Miami in 2016. Her practice, Zaha Hadid Architects, continues her work. Her buildings have been criticised for high costs and for commissions from authoritarian regimes, but she is regarded as one of the most important architects around the turn of the millennium and opened the way for women in the profession.