Zaha Hadid

Born October 31, 1950 in Baghdad, Iraq. She received a degree in mathematics from the American University of Beirut before moving to study at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London. After graduating she worked with her former teacher, Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas at the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, becoming a partner in 1977. It was with Koolhaas that she met Peter Rice who gave her support and encouragement early on, at a time when her work seemed difficult to build. In 1980 she established her own London-based practice. During the 1980s she also taught at the Architectural Association. She has also taught at prestigious institutions around the world; she held the Kenzo Tange Chair at the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University, the Sullivan Chair at the University of Illinois School of Architecture in Chicago, guest professorships at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Hamburg, the Knolton School of Architecture, at the Ohio State University, the Masters Studio at Columbia University, New York and the Eero Saarinen Visiting Professor of Architectural Design at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut. In addition, she was made Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and Fellow of the American Institute of Architects. She is currently Professor at the University of Applied Arts Vienna in Austria.

A winner of many international competitions, theoretically influential and groundbreaking, a number of Hadid's winning designs were initially never built: notably, The Peak Club in Hong Kong(1983) and the Cardiff Bay Opera House in Wales (1994). In 2002 Hadid won the international design competition to design Singapore's one-north masterplan. In 2005, her design won the competition for the new city casino of Basel, Switzerland. In 2004 Hadid became the first female recipient of the Pritzker ArchitecturePrize, architecture's equivalent of the Nobel Prize. Previously, she had been awarded a CBE for services to architecture. She is a member of the editorial board of the Encyclopædia Britannica. In 2006, Hadid was honoured with a retrospective spanning her entire work at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. In that year she also received an Honorary Degree from the American University of Beirut.

Zaha Hadid's work was displayed in a major exhibition at London's Design Museum, from 29 June to 25 November 2007.

Zaha Hadid approached this cube as a huge block to be hollowed out and morphed into a charming sequence of rooms that lead into one another and also open up wide to the outside. Compared to the more open structures of fukasawa’s project, hadid’s ideal house retains the traditional form of the home as a unit and protective shell. The two-story structure has no roof, the walls and furniture appear to grow directly out of a floor that in some cases is totally uneven, and the ceiling is an arched sky

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