Zaha Hadid

Zaha Hadid (1950-2016) was an Iraqi-British architect, born in Baghdad. She studied mathematics at the American University of Beirut, then architecture at the Architectural Association in London under Rem Koolhaas and Elia Zenghelis, graduating in 1977, and worked at their Office for Metropolitan Architecture. She founded her own practice in London in 1980. In 2004 she became the first woman to win the Pritzker Prize, and in 2016 the first woman awarded the RIBA Royal Gold Medal in her own right.

For over a decade her work consisted mainly of competition entries and paintings: she won competitions for The Peak, a club in Hong Kong (1983), and the Cardiff Bay Opera House (1994), and neither was built. Her first completed building was the Vitra Fire Station in Weil am Rhein, Germany (1993), made of sharply angled concrete planes. Her later buildings use continuous curved surfaces in which walls, floors and roofs merge, designed with computer modeling; her partner Patrik Schumacher called this approach parametricism.

Works include the Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati (2003), the Phaeno Science Center in Wolfsburg, Germany (2005), the MAXXI museum in Rome (2010), which won the Stirling Prize, the Guangzhou Opera House (2010), the London Aquatics Centre for the 2012 Olympics, and the Heydar Aliyev Center in Baku, Azerbaijan (2012). She died in Miami in 2016.