Zaha Hadid

Biography

Zaha Hadid’s diploma work at the Architectural Association in London was called “Malevich’s Tektonik”. It was an acrylic painting: a hotel of fourteen levels over Hungerford Bridge, painted under the influence of the Suprematism of Kazimir Malevich.

Later she said more than once in interviews that Russian Constructivism had influenced her method.

Hadid was born on 31 October 1950 in Baghdad. Her father, Muhammad al-Hajj Husayn Hadid, was an industrialist from Mosul and one of the founders of the National Democratic Party, and after the coup of 1958 he became minister of finance. Her mother, Wajiha al-Sabunji, was an artist, also from Mosul. Hadid herself recalled that childhood trips to the ancient Sumerian cities in southern Iraq awakened her interest in architecture. In the 1960s she attended boarding schools in England and Switzerland. She first studied mathematics at the American University of Beirut, and in 1972 moved to London, to the Architectural Association. Her teachers there were Rem Koolhaas, Elia Zenghelis and Bernard Tschumi. Zenghelis remembered that the students called her the inventor of the 89-degree angle: there was no right angle anywhere in her work. The staircases in her drawings, he said, ran into the ceiling, and details such as joinery did not interest her.

After her diploma in 1977 she joined her professors at the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) in Rotterdam. Through Koolhaas she met the engineer Peter Rice, who supported her in her first years. She opened her own practice, Zaha Hadid Architects, in London in 1979 or 1980; sources give different years. She became a citizen of the United Kingdom and taught alongside her practice: at the Architectural Association, then at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, the University of Chicago, the Hochschule für bildende Künste in Hamburg, and Columbia and Yale universities. From 2000 she ran a masterclass at the University of Applied Arts Vienna.

In the 1980s she was known for her lectures and for vivid drawings and paintings of her projects. Magazines published them readily; clients were in no hurry to build. Her project for The Peak, a club in Hong Kong (1983), won the competition but stayed on paper. The same happened with the opera house in Cardiff (1994): the jury chose her design, but the body funding the construction refused, and another architect received the commission. Hadid asked then: “Do they want nothing but mediocrity?” In 1988 she was one of seven architects in the “Deconstructivist Architecture” exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, curated by Philip Johnson and Mark Wigley. After it her name was linked with Deconstructivism, although she herself did not claim membership of any school.

Her first completed work was the fire station for the furniture firm Vitra in Weil am Rhein (1991–1993), built of sharp diagonal volumes of concrete and glass. It served as a fire station only briefly, and the building was then given over to exhibition space. It was commissioned by Rolf Fehlbaum, the head of the firm. It was followed by the ski jump on Bergisel mountain in Innsbruck (1999–2002); the Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati (1997–2003), where she became the first woman to build an art museum in the United States; then the Phæno science centre in Wolfsburg and the BMW building in Leipzig (both 2005).

In 2004 Hadid received the Pritzker Architecture Prize, having by then four completed buildings. The ceremony took place on 31 May in the Hermitage Theatre in Saint Petersburg. Thomas Pritzker, the chairman of the jury, remarked that her body of work was still small, but that her energy and ideas promised more.

After the prize, commissions came one after another: the National Museum of 21st Century Arts (MAXXI) in Rome; the Bridge Pavilion in Zaragoza for Expo 2008; the Sheikh Zayed Bridge in Abu Dhabi (opened in 2010); the opera house in Guangzhou, which she herself called “two pebbles”; the Riverside Museum in Glasgow (2011); and the Aquatics Centre for the 2012 Olympics in London. The cost of the last was three times the original estimate, because of its complex roof. For MAXXI she won the Stirling Prize in 2010, and in 2011 won it again, for the Evelyn Grace Academy, a school in London. In 2011 the CMA CGM Tower in Marseille was completed, her first skyscraper.

The Heydar Aliyev Center in Baku (opened in 2012) received the Design Museum’s Design of the Year award in London in 2014; Hadid became the first woman to take the top prize of the competition. In 2012 she was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire, and in 2013 she became a foreign member of the American Philosophical Society. She visited Russia more than once: in Moscow the Dominion Tower business centre (2015) was built to her design, the house Capital Hill Residence stands in a village near Moscow, and in the summer of 2015 the Hermitage held her first Russian retrospective. Her work “Malevich’s Tektonik” has been in the Hermitage collection since 2017.

She designed more than buildings: installations, interiors, stage sets, furniture for Sawaya & Moroni, shoes for Lacoste, rings for Bulgari. For the tour of the Pet Shop Boys she designed the stage, and at the Millennium Dome in London she made the Mind Zone. Drawings and paintings by Hadid are in the collections of MoMA and the German Architecture Museum in Frankfurt.

In February 2016, a month before her death, she became the first woman to receive the Royal Gold Medal of the Royal Institute of British Architects in her own right. Hadid died on 31 March 2016 in Miami. She is buried at Brookwood Cemetery in Surrey, between her father and brother. The practice completed her unfinished projects after her death: the Salerno Maritime Terminal opened without her, as did Beijing Daxing International Airport.