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Zaha Hadid

Zaha Hadid

 

Zaha Hadid, founder of Zaha Hadid Architects, was awarded the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 2004 and is internationally known for her built, theoretical, and academic work. Each of her projects builds on over thirty years of exploration and research in the interrelated fields of urbanism, architecture, and design.

Born in Baghdad, Iraq, in 1950, Hadid studied mathematics at the American University of Beirut before moving to London in 1972 to attend the Architectural Association (AA) School where she was awarded the Diploma Prize in 1977. Hadid founded Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA) in 1979 and completed her first building, the Vitra Fire Station, Germany, in 1993. Hadid taught at the AA School until 1987 and held numerous chairs and guest professorships at universities around the world including Columbia, Harvard, Yale, and the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. 

The evolution of Hadid’s buildings—from the interlocking forms of the Vitra Fire Station to the awesome, flowing urban spaces of the MAXXI Museum of 21st Century art in Rome, London Aquatics Centre for the London 2012 Olympics and Heydar Aliyev Centre in Baku—demonstrates a consistent desire to question and innovate. Form and space are woven within structure. These are buildings which emerge from their context and are also capable of knitting disparate programs together; always surprising and always making connections.

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