Zaha Hadid
The architect who bent the right angle out of the discipline — and became the first woman to win its highest prize.
For years Zaha Hadid's buildings existed only as paintings — swooping, splintered geometries the industry deemed unbuildable. Then, one by one, they were built. By the time she died in 2016 she had rewritten what a curve could carry, and broken the discipline's tallest glass ceiling.
Drawing the impossible
Trained at London's Architectural Association, Hadid worked for a decade in fragments and force-fields — competition entries and canvases that treated a building as motion frozen mid-gesture. Her breakthrough, the Vitra Fire Station of 1993, proved the paintings could stand up.
There are 360 degrees, so why stick to one?
Recognition, at last
In 2004 she became the first woman to receive the Pritzker Prize; in 2016, the first woman awarded the RIBA Royal Gold Medal in her own right. Her practice, Zaha Hadid Architects, carried the language of continuous surface from Baku to Guangzhou.
