Revolutionary Architect, Zaha Hadid
When we stare at large buildings in concrete jungles we do not think of women. We do not immediately imagine a woman behind the giant skyscrapers that house corporations, museums and government agencies. The buildings Zaha designed are probably some of these buildings that have been started with awe.
Zaha was born on October 31, 1950, into a wealthy family in Baghdad, Iraq. Rich Mosul-based industrialist Muhammad al-Hajj Husayn Hadid was her father. The left-liberal al-Ahali group, an important political organization in the 1930s and 1940s, was co-founded by him in 1932.
He was a founding member of the Iraqi National Democratic Party and served as the administration of General Abd al-Karim Qasim's minister of finance after the toppling of the monarchy in the 1958 Iraqi coup d'état. Her brother Foulath Hadid is a writer, accountant, and authority on Arab issues, while her mother Wajiha al-Sabunji was an artist from Mosul.
In a previous interview, Zaha described how visits to the historic Sumerian sites in southern Iraq as a young child inspired her to become an artist.
She attended boarding institutions in England and Switzerland in the 1960s. She was not married and had no children. Before going to London to attend the Architectural Association School of Architecture in 1972, She first studied mathematics at the American University of Beirut. There, Rem Koolhaas, Elia Zenghelis, and Bernard Tschumi were her professors. Upon her graduation, her former professor Koolhaas called her "a planet in her orbit."
She was the most exceptional student Zenghelis had ever had. "We dubbed her the 89-degree inventor." Never was anything 90 degrees. She had an amazing vision. Building after building was bursting into little fragments." He recalled that she didn't pay much attention to small issues like stairs.
"She drew the staircase in such a way that you would hit your head against the ceiling, the room would get smaller and smaller, and you would eventually wind up in the upper corner of the ceiling. She could be unconcerned with minor matters. She wasn't thinking about the details because She knew we could fix the joinery afterwards."
She was correct. Her AA degree thesis, Malevich's Tektonik, was an acrylic painting that was inspired by the works of Russian supremacist artist Kazimir Malevich and was a concept and design for a 14-level hotel on London's Hungerford Bridge.
Zaha started working with her former teachers Koolhaas and Zenghelis at the Office for Metropolitan Architecture in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, after receiving her degree in 1977.
She got to know the architectural engineer Peter Rice through her connection to Koolhaas, and he helped and encouraged her at the beginning of her career. She acquired British citizenship through naturalization. In 1980, she established Zaha She Architects, her own architectural company. Through her meticulous and expert sketches in the early 1980s, She's style introduced people to a new modern architectural style. Her designs were a distinct approach to architecture at a period when people were focused on postmodernist designs, which made her stand out from other architects.
The Vitra Fire Station in Weil am Rhein, Germany, was She's first significant construction undertaking. The building, which is made up of several sharply angled planes, looks like a bird in flight.
Her other constructed works from this period include: the Land Formation One exhibition space (1999) in Weil am Rhein, a housing project for IBA Housing (1993) in Berlin, and the Mind Zone exhibition space (1999) at the Millennium Dome in Greenwich, London.
With each of these endeavours, She deepened her exploration of her passion for building dynamic sculptural architecture and linking spaces. When construction on She's new Lois & Richard Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art got underway in 2000, she cemented her reputation as a built-works architect. The first museum in America to be created by a woman was the 85,000-square-foot (7,900-square-meter) which debuted in 2003.
The museum, which is essentially a vertical succession of cubes and voids, is situated in the heart of Cincinnati's downtown. The façade of the museum is made of translucent glass on the side that faces the street, which dispels the idea that it is a cold or distant place by allowing visitors to peek inside. Once the visitor enters the building, the structure's layout softly slopes upward; She expressed the aim that this would create an "urban carpet" that invites people inside the museum.
Zaha who was most renowned for her radical deconstructivist designs passed away on March 31, 2016, in Miami, Florida, USA.