Zaha Hadid died of a heart attack this morning at a hospital in Miami, where she was hospitalized earlier this week for bronchitis. Hadid was one of the most famous and distinguished architects of our day, among other things, becoming the first woman to receive the RIBA Gold Medal and the Pritzker Prize.
Hadid was born in Baghdad in 1950 to the family of an industrialist, one of the founders of the National Democratic Party of Iraq, a representative of the Western-oriented big bourgeoisie. As a child, she decided that she wanted to become an architect. In 1972, after graduating from the mathematics department of the American University of Beirut, Hadid entered the architecture school of the Architectural Association in London. Rem Koolhaas and Elia Zengelis were her teachers there.
The Russian architectural avant-garde of the 1920s and the work of Kazimir Malevich had a strong influence on her as an architect, but her creative language has always remained brightly original. Koolhaas called it "a planet in its own orbit." Zengelis considered her the most talented person who ever studied with him. But, according to his recollections, she needed help with the development of secondary details - especially with the stairs, which in her student projects always rested against the ceiling.
In 1977 she worked for six months in the studio of Rem Koolhaas OMA, in 1979 she founded her own bureau Zaha Hadid Architects in London. Her project of the Peak Club (1983) on a hill above Hong Kong, which won a major international competition, attracted public attention to Hadid, but remained unrealized as the client went bankrupt.
In 1994, Hadid became widely known in the UK, having won a competition for the project of an opera house in Cardiff, but the developer - influenced by public opinion - after a year and a half of conflicts, abandoned the project, fearing the originality of the architectural solution.
Hadid's first project was the Vitra fire station in Vejle am Rhein (1991-1993).
The situation changed dramatically in 1999, when the construction of the Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati, USA (opened in 2003) began - from that moment Hadid began to be invited to work in different countries of the world, her bureau became one of the leading international architectural firms.
Zaha Hadid's paintings and drawings have been exhibited many times in many countries; the first major exhibition was a retrospective at AA in 1983. Also major exhibitions were held at the GA Gallery in Tokyo (1985), the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York (1988) as part of a group of deconstructivist architects, at Harvard University (1994) and even the waiting room of the Grand Central Station in New York (1995), as well as the Vienna MAK (2003) and New York's Guggenheim Museum (2006). Hadid's works are included in many museum collections, in particular - MoMA and the German Museum of Architecture in Frankfurt am Main (DAM).
Zaha Hadid had the title of Commander of the French Order of Arts and Letters, Lady Commander of the Order of the British Empire, was a laureate of the Japanese Praemium Imperiale.
