Design Feature
Jockey Club Innovation Tower @ Hong Kong Polytechnic University.
Photo credit: Doublespace
Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati.
Photo credit: Roland Halbe
Galaxy Soho, Beijing.
Photo credit: Hufton + Crow
Heydar Aliyev Center, Baku (Azerbaijan).
Photo credit: Hufton+Crow
Dame Zaha Hadid.
Photo credit: Mary McCartney
World-renowned British architect
passes away at aged 65
Zaha Hadid (1950-2016) was hailed as one of the most influential architects in the world.
ZAHA HADID Architects has released a
statement to confirm that its founder, Dame
Zaha Hadid, DBE has passed away in Miami
on 31 March 2016. She had contracted
bronchitis earlier in the week and suffered
a sudden heart attack while being treated in
hospital.
Hadid was widely regarded as one of the
greatest female architects in the world. Born
in Baghdad in 1950, she studied mathematics
at the American University of Beirut before
starting her architectural journey in 1972 at
the Architectural Association in London.
By 1979 she had established her own
practice in London – Zaha Hadid Architects
– garnering a reputation across the world
for her ground-breaking theoretical works
including The Peak in Hong Kong (1983),
the Kurfürstendamm in Berlin (1986) and the
Cardiff Bay Opera House in Wales (1994).
Working with office partner Patrik
Schumacher, her interest was in the interface
between architecture, landscape, and geology;
which her practice integrates with the use of
innovative technologies often resulting in
unexpected and dynamic architectural forms.
Hadid’s first major built commission, one
that affirmed her international recognition,
was the Vitra Fire Station in Weil Am Rhein,
Germany (1993); subsequent notable projects
including the MAXXI: Italian National
Museum of 21st Century Arts in Rome
(2009), the London Aquatics Centre for the
2012 Olympic Games (2011) and the Heydar
Aliyev Centre in Baku (2013) illustrate her
quest for complex, fluid space. Buildings such
as the Rosenthal Center for Contemporary
Art in Cincinnati (2003) and the Guangzhou
Opera House in China (2010) have also
been hailed as architecture that transforms
our ideas of the future with visionary spatial
concepts defined by advanced design, material
and construction processes.
In 2004, Zaha Hadid became the
first woman to be awarded the Pritzker
Architecture Prize. She twice won the UK’s
most prestigious architecture award, the
RIBA Stirling Prize: in 2010 for the MAXXI
Museum in Rome; and the EvelynGrace
Academy. Hadid’s other awards included the
Republic of France’s Commandeur de l’Ordre
des Arts et des Lettres and Japan’s Praemium
Imperiale.
In 2012, Hadid was made a Dame
Commander of the Order of the British
Empire. In academia, she held the Kenzo
Tange Chair at Harvard University and the
Sullivan Chair at the University of Illinois;
and lectured at Columbia University, Yale
University and the University of Applied Arts
in Vienna.
More information at www.zaha-hadid.com
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