Zaha Mohammad Hadid is one of the few Arab women who dedicated their lives to creativity and became famous throughout the world. She is a designer and architect, Dame Commander of the British Order, the first woman on the planet to receive the prestigious Pritzker Prize for Architecture.
Biography
Zaha was born in the capital of Iraq on the last day of October 1950 to an upper-class middle-class family. Her father was a wealthy industrialist, and then in 1932 began a successful political career, at the same time he moved with his wife, an artist from Mosul, a small city in northern Iraq, to Baghdad.
As a child, Hadid Zaha often traveled with her father through the remains of the ancient Sumerian cities, at the same time a love for architecture arose in her. In the sixties, Zaha studied at elite boarding schools in England and Switzerland, and then entered the American University in Beirut, where she studied mathematics, being carried away by the creations of Russian architects and the visual arts.
In 1972, thanks to the support of her family, parents and elder brother Fulat, already a well-known writer and publicist, Zaha continued her education at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London. The student's amazing talent, ability to be creative and her attention to small details were noted by all her mentors, and among them there are many big names. Zakha's fourth-year student project was a hotel in the form of a bridge from a painting by Malevich.
Career
Zaha began her professional career immediately after graduation, in 1977. She was invited to work at the Office of the Metropolitan Architecture of Rotterdam. And three years later, having acquired her own unique style and invaluable experience in complex projects, Zaha opened her own firm in London.
The unusual design of Hadid's creations attracted everyone's attention. She published her projects and sketches in many magazines, where she was called the representative of deconstructivism, neo-futurism. In fact, Zaha did not have a single style, each creation was unique. In the eighties, she began teaching architecture, first at her alma mater in London, and then at Harvard, the Universities of Chicago and Cambridge, without abandoning her main passion - the design of stately buildings.
Zaha's ambitious, unusual, futuristic projects won many competitions, but not all were built due to financial considerations. She has credited the Phaeno Science Center in Wolsburg, Germany, the building of the Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati, the Opera House in Guangzhou, the famous Sheikh Zayed Bridge, the famous Peresvet Plaza in the capital of Russia and much more in Azerbaijan, Korea, Austria, Hong Kong, Belgium, Lithuania, Italy, USA …
The beauty of the architecture that Zaha created is distinguished by the aesthetics of lightness and rationalism, simplicity of lines and carefulness of details. “Light that took form” - this is how they say about her creations today.
Personal life and death
Unfortunately, Zaha Hadid gave all her love to architecture and did not start a family. Her death shocked the whole world - at the end of March 2016, she died of a heart attack in Miami.
