Artist of the day, May 22, 2020: Dame Zaha Mohammad Hadid, an Iraqi–British architect

Dame Zaha Mohammad Hadid DBE RA (1950 – 2016) was an Iraqi–British architect.

She 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. 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 and only woman to be awarded the Royal Gold Medal from the Royal Institute of British Architects.

 Her major works include the London Aquatics Centre for the 2012 Olympics, Michigan State University's Broad Art Museum in the US, the MAXXI Museum in Rome, the Guangzhou Opera House in China, and the Beijing Daxing International Airport in China. Some of her awards have been presented posthumously, including the statuette for the 2017 Brit Awards. Several of her buildings were still under construction at the time of her death, including the Daxing airport and the Al Wakrah Stadium in Qatar, a venue for the 2022 FIFA World Cup.

Zaha Hadid was born in Baghdad, Iraq, to an upper class Iraqi family. Her father, Muhammad al-Hajj Husayn Hadid, 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.

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

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 Welsh government refused to pay for it, and the commission was given to a different and less ambitious architect. Her reputation in this period rested largely upon her teaching and the imaginative and colourful paintings she made of her proposed buildings. Her international reputation was greatly enhanced in 1988 when she was chosen to show her drawings and paintings as one of seven architects chosen to participate in the exhibition "Deconstructivism in Architecture" curated by Philip Johnson and Mark Wigley at New York's Museum of Modern Art.

The architectural style of Hadid is not easily categorised, and she did not describe herself as a follower of any one style or school. Nonetheless, before she had built a single major building, she was categorised by the Metropolitan Museum of Art as a major figure in architectural Deconstructivism. Her work was also described as an example of neo-futurism and parametricism. An article profiling Hadid in the New Yorker magazine was titled "The Abstractionist".

Through her design style, she paints the conceptual designs of her many projects in fluid and geometrical forms where "Zaha Hadid's work took shape."  These would be large paintings that would aspire towards her design process and "rational nature of her construction, the drawings pulled the parts and pieces apart, exploding its site and program."

When she was awarded the Pritzker Prize in 2004, the jury chairman, Lord Rothschild, commented: "At the same time as her theoretical and academic work, as a practicing architect, Zaha Hadid has been unswerving in her commitment to modernism. Always inventive, she's moved away from existing typology, from high tech, and has shifted the geometry of buildings."

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Vitra Fire Station, Weil am Rhein, Germany, 1990-93

Phaeno Science Center, Wolfsburg, Germany, 2000-05

BMW Central Building, Leipzig, Germany, 2001-05

BMW Central Building, Leipzig, Germany, 2001-05

Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, Ohio, 2003

London Aquatics Centre, London, England, 2005-11

London Aquatics Centre, London, England, 2005-11

Nuragic and Contemporary Art Museum,  2006

Nuragic and Contemporary Art Museum,  2006

Capital Hill Residence, Barvikha, Russia, 2006-18

Capital Hill Residence, Barvikha, Russia, 2006-18

Riverside Museum, Glasgow, United Kingdom, 2007-10 

Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University,
East Lansing, Michigan 2007-12

Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University,
East Lansing, Michigan 2007-12 

Innovation Tower, Kowloon, China, 2007-14

Innovation Tower, Kowloon, China, 2007-14

2007–13 Dongdaemun Design Plaza, Seoul, South Korea, 2007–13

2007–13 Dongdaemun Design Plaza, Seoul, South Korea, 2007–13

2008 Bridge Pavilion, Zaragoza, Spain, 2008

Wangjing SOHO, Beijing, China, 2009-14

Wangjing SOHO, Beijing, China, 2009-14

Sheikh Zayed Bridge, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, 2010

Sheikh Zayed Bridge, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, 2010

Fereshteh Pasargad Hotel, Tehran, Iran,  2011-20

2012 Pierres Vives, Montpellier, France, 2012

 Dominion Tower, Moscow, Russia, 2012-15

Heydar Aliyev Center, Baku, Azerbaijan, 2013

Heydar Aliyev Center, Baku, Azerbaijan, 2013

Heydar Aliyev Center, Baku, Azerbaijan, 2013

Heydar Aliyev Center, Baku, Azerbaijan, 2013

Napoli Afragola railway station, Naples, Italy, 2015-17

Napoli Afragola railway station, Naples, Italy, 2015-17

Leeza SOHO, Beijing, China, 2015-19

Leeza SOHO, Beijing, China, 2015-19

520 West 28th Street, NYC, 2016

Port Authority, Antwerp, Belgium, 2016

Generali Tower, Milan, Italy, 2018

 One Thousand Museum, Miami, Florida, 2019

 One Thousand Museum, Miami, Florida, 2019