Dame Zaha Mohammad Hadid, DBE certainly designed glass ceilings. Yet she also shattered them. She was the uncrowned queen of contemporary, iconic architecture. The world's most famous woman in the starchitect stratosphere had a renowned boldly modern, organic and innovative style. Hadid's projects are characterised by their supplely, curving shapes or crystallised layers, a type of architecture that is luxurious, vibrant and fetching. Basically, the architect consistently pushed boundaries through new technology and materials and never did ordinary.
Since her student days in London at the Architectural Association School of Architecture, Hadid, who was Iraqi-British, had been extremely preoccupied with changing people’s general notions of space, in a social and cultural sense as well as a physical one. Along with her strong theoretical and historical awareness, nature's forms and shapes appear as a recurrent source of inspiration for Hadid's architecture. It includes attention to physical contexts and landscapes, whether resulting in layered structures or powerful moving lines, but also exploring possible interfaces between patterns and construction.
Hadid, who was also a celebrated painter, won the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 2004 — the first woman to do so—and the Stirling Prize in 2010 and 2011. Then she secured the RIBA National Award for her work on the London Aquatics Centre in 2014 and was a winner during the Designs of the Year 2014 in the Architecture Category for the Heydar Aliyev Centre in Baku, Azerbaijan.
Zaha Hadid Architects
Hadid’s London-based firm, Zaha Hadid Architects, create transformative cultural, corporate and residential landmark projects at all scales. You can find them working on urban design schemes to objects and furniture design. The 400 staff members’ efforts have resulted in a staggering number of projects in lots of different countries. Some of the company’s projects have included the Abu Dhabi Performing Arts Centre, Al Wakrah Stadium in Qatar and the Beethoven Concert Hall in Bonn, Germany. They are also associated with the Beijing New Airport Terminal Building, the Bilbao Bizkaia Kutxa Bank Headquarters in Spain and the New Olympic Stadium for Tokyo’s 2020 Olympics.
