Zaha Hadid

Born in Iraq in 1950, Zaha Hadid was the first woman to win the Pritzker prize, the field’s highest honor. But for years, she had to fight to prove that her designs could even be built. She was a pioneer in Deconstructivism: Designing buildings that looked unstable, jagged, or frozen in mid-explosion. She gained a reputation for her gorgeous, fantastical designs—painted by hand. But her ideas looked impossible to build, so they remained on paper.

Then, in 1983, she won a big competition to design a club in the hills of Hong Kong. Hadid proposed carving chunks out of the mountainside, which she called a “man-made geology.” The project was eventually canceled, but the world of architecture then knew her name.

Still, it took another decade before one of her concepts actually got built: A fire station in Germany with no right angles; looking like it could take flight. It was a great success—quickly becoming a prime example of Deconstructivist architecture.

Around the same time, she won an international competition to design an opera house in Wales, but it was overruled by local politicians, and the funding was pulled. Later, Hadid said it was resistance and prejudice that killed the project.

But she kept winning competitions, building momentum—and finally, buildings! By the early 2000s, she was an architecture superstar. She still drew by hand, but adopted new computer technology to model her designs. The software made even wilder shapes possible—including the curves that became her signature. A Hadid design was no longer crazy or impossible—it was simply a Hadid.

Sadly, she died of a heart attack in 2016. By then she had built hundreds of buildings, with many more in progress. And she had proved she could build nearly anything she could imagine.

The Paper Architect

For a long time, Zaha Hadid was known as “the paper architect,” someone whose grand designs never left the page to become real buildings. But in recent years her buildings have sprung up like mushrooms all over the world: the Guangzhou Opera House in China, a car factory in Germany, a contemporary art museum in Rome, a transportation museum in Scotland, and the Aquatics Center for the 2012 Olympics in London.

Pinning down her individual style is difficult. Certainly Hadid has been influenced by the modern trend in architecture that likes to play with the traditional shape of buildings and fragment (分解) them, creating unpredictable angles and surfaces. Working in this way, she and her fellow architects have produced some spaceship-like structures that seem to go against the normal laws of engineering.

The idea of offering the viewer multiple perspectives from within the building is a theme that runs through Hadid’s work. Her most famous building, MAXXI—a museum for the 21st century— in Rome, is a great example. It is a complex and spectacular structure of interlocking concrete shapes. Inside spaces interconnect Tike winding streets, so that the visitor is surprised and charmed at each turn. The Rosenthal Center in Cincinnati produces a similar effect. Like an extension of the street it sits on, it draws you in, with walkways directing you this way and that, and windows inviting you to sample the view. “It’s about promenading” says Hadid, “being able to pause, to look out, look above, look sideways.”

So what inspires someone like Hadid to produce such different buildings? She speaks in complimentary terms about the work of her contemporaries. She also cites the natural landscape and organic geological patterns as an influence. But it is not a question that she seems too concerned with and nor perhaps should we be. Hadid is an artist, sharing with us her vision of what buildings should be like and always, as she does so, trying to keep human interests—our interests as users and viewers—at heart.