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| Zaha Hadid |
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| Dame Zaha Mohammad Hadid DBE RA (Arabic: زها حديد Zahā Ḥadīd; 31 October 1950 – 31 March 2016) was an Iraqi-British architect. |
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| She was the first woman to receive the Pritzker Architecture Prize, in 2004. |
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| She received the UK's most prestigious architectural award, the Stirling Prize, in 2010 and 2011. |
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| In 2012, she was made a Dame by Elizabeth II for services to architecture, and in 2015 she became the first and only woman to be awarded the Royal Gold Medal from the Royal Institute of British Architects. |
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| She was described by The Guardian of London as the 'Queen of the curve', who 'liberated architectural geometry, giving it a whole new expressive identity.' |
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| Her major works include the aquatic centre for the London 2012 Olympics, Michigan State University's Broad Art Museum in the US, and the Guangzhou Opera House in China. |
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| Some of her designs have been presented posthumously, including the statuette for the 2017 Brit Awards, and many of her buildings are still under construction, including the Al Wakrah Stadium in Qatar, a venue for the 2022 FIFA World Cup. |
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| Early life and academic career |
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| Hadid was born on 31 October 1950 in Baghdad, Iraq, to an upper-class Iraqi family. |
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| Her father Mohammed Hadid Muhammad al-Hajj Husayn Hadid was a wealthy industrialist from Mosul. |
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| He co-founded the left-liberal al-Ahali group in 1932, a significant political organisation in the 1930s and 1940s. |
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| He was the co-founder of the National Democratic Party in Iraq. |
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| He 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. |
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| Her mother Wajiha al-Sabunji was an artist from Mosul. |
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| In the 1960s Hadid attended boarding schools in England and Switzerland. |
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| Hadid studied mathematics at the American University of Beirut before moving, in 1972, to London to study at the Architectural Association School of Architecture. |
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| There she studied with Rem Koolhaas, Elia Zenghelis and Bernard Tschumi. |
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| Her former professor, Koolhaas, described her at graduation as 'a planet in her own orbit.' |
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| Zenghelis described her as the most outstanding pupil he ever taught. |
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| 'We called her the inventor of the 89 degrees. |
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| Nothing was ever at 90 degrees. |
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| She had spectacular vision. |
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| All the buildings were exploding into tiny little pieces.' |
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| He recalled that she was less interested in details, such as staircases. |
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| '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. |
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| She couldn’t care about tiny details. |
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| Her mind was on the broader pictures — |
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| when it came to the joinery she knew we could fix that later. |
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| She was right.’ |
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| Her fourth-year student project was a painting of a hotel in the form of a bridge, inspired by the works of the Russian suprematist artist Kazimir Malevich |