Zaha Hadid

He co-founded the left-liberal al-Ahali group in 1932, a significant political organisation in the 1930s and 1940s.

Dame Zaha Mohammad Hadid (زها حديد Zahā Ḥadīd; 31 October 1950 – 31 March 2016) was an Iraqi-British architect, artist and designer, recognized as a major figure in architecture of the late-20th and early-21st centuries.

Zaha Hadid was born on 31 October 1950 in Baghdad, Iraq, to an upper-class Iraqi family.

Her father, Muhammad al-Hajj Husayn Hadid, was a wealthy industrialist from Mosul.

He was the co-founder of the National Democratic Party in Iraq and served as minister of finance after the overthrow of the monarch after the 1958 Iraqi coup d'état for the government of General Abd al-Karim Qasim.

Her mother, Wajiha al-Sabunji, was an artist from Mosul while her brother Foulath Hadid was a writer, accountant and expert on Arab affairs.

Hadid once mentioned in an interview how her early childhood trips to the ancient Sumerian cities in southern Iraq sparked her interest in architecture.

In the 1960s, Hadid attended boarding schools in England and Switzerland.

Hadid was unmarried with no children.

Born in Baghdad, Iraq, Hadid studied mathematics as an undergraduate and then enrolled at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in 1972.

In search of an alternative system to traditional architectural drawing, and influenced by Suprematism and the Russian avant-garde, Hadid adopted painting as a design tool and abstraction as an investigative principle to "reinvestigate the aborted and untested experiments of Modernism [...] to unveil new fields of building".

She was described by The Guardian as the "Queen of Curves", who "liberated architectural geometry, giving it a whole new expressive identity".

Hadid studied mathematics at the American University of Beirut before moving, in 1972, to London to study at the Architectural Association School of Architecture.

There she studied with Rem Koolhaas, Elia Zenghelis and Bernard Tschumi.

Her former professor, Koolhaas, described her at graduation as "a planet in her own orbit."

Zenghelis described her as the most outstanding pupil he ever taught.

'We called her the inventor of the 89 degrees.

Nothing was ever at 90 degrees.

She had spectacular vision.

All the buildings were exploding into tiny little pieces." He recalled that she was less interested in details, such as staircases. "The way she drew a staircase you would smash your head against the ceiling, and the space was reducing and reducing, and you would end up in the upper corner of the ceiling.

She couldn't care about tiny details.

Her mind was on the broader pictures—when it came to the joinery she knew we could fix that later.

She was right.' Her AA graduation thesis, Malevich's Tektonik, was a concept and design for a 14-level hotel on London's Hungerford Bridge executed as an acrylic painting, inspired by the works of the Russian suprematist artist Kazimir Malevich.

After graduation in 1977, she went to work for her former professors, Koolhaas and Zenghelis, at the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.

Through her association with Koolhaas, she met the architectural engineer Peter Rice, who gave her support and encouragement during the early stages of her career.

Hadid became a naturalised citizen of the United Kingdom.

She opened her own architectural firm, Zaha Hadid Architects, in London in 1980.

During the early 1980s Hadid's style introduced audiences to a new modern architecture style through her extremely detailed and professional sketches.

At the time people were focused on postmodernism designs, so her designs were a different approach to architecture that set her apart from other designers.

She then began her career teaching architecture, first at the Architectural Association, then, over the years at Harvard Graduate School of Design, Cambridge University, the University of Chicago, the Hochschule für bildende Künste in Hamburg, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and Columbia University.

She earned her early reputation with her lecturing and colourful and radical early designs and projects, which were widely published in architectural journals but remained largely unbuilt.

Her ambitious but unbuilt projects included a plan for Peak in Hong Kong (1983), and a plan for an opera house in Cardiff, Wales, (1994).

The Cardiff experience was particularly discouraging; her design was chosen as the best by the competition jury, but the Millennium Commission, acting as funding body, refused to pay for it, and the commission was given to a different and less ambitious architect.

Hadid's response to the decision was to ask "Do they want nothing but mediocrity?".

Hadid was the first woman to receive the Pritzker Architecture Prize, in 2004.

She received the UK's most prestigious architectural award, the Stirling Prize, in 2010 and 2011.

Her major works include the London Aquatics Centre for the 2012 Olympics, the Broad Art Museum, Rome's MAXXI Museum, and the Guangzhou Opera House.

In 2012, she was made a Dame by Elizabeth II for services to architecture, and in February 2016, the month preceding her death, she became the first woman to be individually awarded the Royal Gold Medal from the Royal Institute of British Architects (Ray Eames and Sheila O'Donnell had previously been awarded it jointly with Charles Eames and John Tuomey respectively).

With several awards and accolades to her name, she has also been recognized by the 2013 Forbes List as one of the "World's Most Powerful Women" Several of her buildings were still under construction at the time of her death, including the Daxing International Airport in Beijing, and the Al Wakrah Stadium (now Al Janoub) in Qatar, a venue for the 2022 FIFA World Cup.

Some of her awards have been presented posthumously, including the statuette for the 2017 Brit Awards.