The Baghdad-born British architect Zaha Hadid has established herself as one of today's preeminent postmodern architects with her fantastical, highly fluid spaces--spaces that seem to take on new forms as the viewer moves through them. The first woman to win the Pritzker Prize, the highest honor in architecture, Hadid has designed buildings in her own inimitably organic style around the world, with ongoing projects including a performing arts center on Abu Dhabi's Saatiyat Island and the stadium for London's 2012 Olympics. … (read more)

The Baghdad-born British architect Zaha Hadid has established herself as one of today's preeminent postmodern architects with her fantastical, highly fluid spaces--spaces that seem to take on new forms as the viewer moves through them. The first woman to win the Pritzker Prize, the highest honor in architecture, Hadid has designed buildings in her own inimitably organic style around the world, with ongoing projects including a performing arts center on Abu Dhabi's Saatiyat Island and the stadium for London's 2012 Olympics.

Raised in convent schools in Iraq and Switzerland, Hadid studied mathematics at the American University in Beirut and then attended the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London, where her teachers included the renowned theoretical architects Rem Koolhaas and Elia Zengheli. During these years the school rejected the movement toward postmodernism and strove toward a neo-Modernist paradigm, within which architects worked to embrace and embody the chaos and unpredictability of modern existence in the structural forms they created.

After Hadid graduated in 1977, Koolhaas and Zengheli invited her to join them at their firm, the Office for Metropolitan Architecture. During this period her work continued to adapt in the direction of the new Modernist architecture, one in which the user experience was designed to evolve with the moving perspective and reflect the dynamism and turmoil of our contemporary world. Hadid soon branched out on her own, establishing her own firm, Zaha Hadid Architects, in 1980. Her novel approach led to significant public resistance to many of her ambitious proposals, perceived to be too radical for the mass market. Her designs were executed in vivid, impressionistic digital models rather than the more traditional architectural drawings, and were thought by many to be impossible to build--marvels of mathematics and computer graphics instead of real-world structures. But while Hadid's radical style was at first dismissed by clients, her reputation began to grow based on her daring unbuilt designs.

With time Hadid began to receive some commissions, and critical acclaim quickly followed. The New York Times called her execution of the Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati, Ohio, “the most important new building in America since the Cold War.” The validation of Hadid's work led to a flood of commissions, including the notable BMW Central Building in Leipzig and an opera house in Dubai. In 2006 the Guggenheim Museum in New York honored her with a retrospective exhibition.

Watch a video of Hadid's design for a planned Guggenheim satellite museum in Vilnius, Lithuania:

Watch a video of her design for London's 2012 Olympic Stadium:

Watch a video slide show of Hadid's other futuristic computer models:

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