57 Facts About Zaha Hadid

Dame Zaha Mohammad Hadid was an Iraqi-British architect, artist and designer, recognised as a major figure in architecture of the late-20th and early-21st centuries.

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

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

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

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

Zaha Hadid's father, Muhammad al-Hajj Husayn Hadid, was a wealthy industrialist from Mosul.

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

Zaha 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'etat for the government of General Abd al-Karim Qasim.

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

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

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

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

Zaha Hadid 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 fur bildende Kunste in Hamburg, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and Columbia University.

Zaha Hadid 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.

Zaha Hadid's design, made of raw concrete and glass, was a sculptural work composed of sharp diagonal forms colliding together in the centre.

In 1994, Zaha Hadid was commissioned by the city of Vienna to design and construct a three-part scheme for the urban redevelopment of an area adjacent to the Danube Canal.

Zaha Hadid designed a public housing estate in Berlin and organised an exhibition, "The Great Utopia", at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

Zaha Hadid's next major project was a ski jump at Bergisel, in Innsbruck Austria.

Zaha Hadid had to fight against traditionalists and against time; the project had to be completed in one year, before the next international competition.

Zaha Hadid's design is 48 metres high and rests on a base seven metres by seven metres.

Zaha Hadid described it as "an organic hybrid", a cross between a bridge and a tower, which by its form gives a sense of movement and speed.

Zaha Hadid competed against Rem Koolhaas and other well-known architects for the design of the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Zaha Hadid won, and became the first woman to design an art museum in the United States.

Between 1997 and 2010, Zaha Hadid ventured into the engineers' domain of bridge construction, a field occupied by other top architects including Norman Foster and Santiago Calatrava.

Zaha Hadid took inspiration from the surrounding orthogonal site grids to determine the overall form.

The design is intended to generate what Zaha Hadid called "confluence, interference and turbulence",.

In 2002 Zaha Hadid won an international competition for her first project in China.

Zaha Hadid described her Aquatics Centre for the 2012 Summer Olympics in London as "inspired by the fluid geometry of water in movement".

Zaha Hadid wrote that she designed the building so that its sloping pleated stainless steel facades would reflect the surrounding neighbourhood from different angles; the building continually changes colour depending upon the weather, the time of day and the angle of the sun.

Zaha Hadid wrote that "its fluid form emerges from the folds of the natural topography of the landscape and envelops the different functions of the centre", though the building when completed was largely surrounded by Soviet-era apartment blocks.

Several architecture critics who admired the work itself felt that Dame Zaha Hadid should have raised questions about this repressive leader even as she accepted the commission, and other critics questioned the UK granting its most prestigious architecture award to a building which memorialized a vicious Soviet dictator.

Zaha Hadid worked in collaboration with architect and heritage specialist Liam O'Connor, whose reconstructions and conversions of the original space were designed in consultation with English Heritage and Westminster City Council.

Early designs experimented with a facade made of reinforced plastic, textiles or aluminium, but Zaha Hadid finally settled upon metal panels with multiple layers.

Wangjing SOHO tower in Beijing is the second building Zaha Hadid designed for the major Chinese property developer, located half-way between the centre of Beijing and the airport.

On 31 March 2016, Zaha Hadid died of a heart attack at the age of 65 at Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami, where she was being treated for bronchitis.

The statement issued by her London-based design studio announcing her death read, "Zaha Hadid was widely regarded to be the greatest female architect in the world today".

Zaha Hadid is buried between her father Mohammed Hadid and brother Foulath Hadid in Brookwood Cemetery in Brookwood, Surrey, England.

Zaha Hadid won the competition for the building in 2000, but then the project was delayed due to funding and technical issues.

Zaha Hadid scouted the site from a police boat in the harbour to visualise how it would appear from the water.

The Scorpion Tower of Miami, now known as One Thousand Museum, was started while Zaha Hadid was still alive though currently undergoing completion posthumously.

In 2006, Zaha Hadid founded Zaha Hadid Design ; her eponymous design studio.

In 2013, Zaha Hadid designed Liquid Glacial for David Gill Gallery which comprises a series of tables resembling ice-formations made from clear and coloured acrylic.

Zaha Hadid embodied, in its profligacy and promise, the era of so-called starchitects who roamed the planet in pursuit of their own creative genius, offering miracles, occasionally delivering.

Zaha Hadid was not keen to be characterised as a woman architect, or an Arab architect.

Sometimes called the "Queen of the curve", Zaha Hadid was frequently described in the press as the world's top female architect.

The architectural style of Zaha Hadid is not easily categorised, and she did not describe herself as a follower of any one style or school.

Zaha Hadid's work was described as an example of neo-futurism and parametricism.

At the time when technology was integrating into design, Zaha Hadid accepted the use of technology but still continued to hand draw her buildings and make models of the designs.

Zaha Hadid was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 2002 Birthday Honours and Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 2012 Birthday Honours for services to architecture.

Zaha Hadid was named an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and an honorary fellow of the American Institute of Architects.

Zaha Hadid was on the board of trustees of The Architecture Foundation.

In 2002, Zaha Hadid won the international design competition to design Singapore's one-north master plan.

In 2004, Zaha Hadid became the first female recipient of the Pritzker Architecture Prize.

In 2014,2015 and 2016, Zaha Hadid appeared on Debrett's list of the most influential people in the UK.

Google celebrated her achievements with a Doodle on 31 May 2017, to commemorate the date on which Zaha Hadid became the first woman to win the prestigious Pritzker Architecture Prize.

In 2012, Zaha Hadid won an international competition to design a new National Olympic Stadium as part of the successful bid by Tokyo to host the 2020 Summer Olympics.

Zaha Hadid had planned to enter the new competition, but her firm was unable to meet the new requirement of finding a construction company with which to partner.