Zaha Mohammad Hadid is one of the few Arab women who have devoted their lives to creativity and have become famous throughout the world. She is a designer and architect, the lady commander of the British Order, the first woman on the planet to receive the prestigious Pritzker Prize in architecture.
Biography
Zaha was born in the capital of Iraq on the last day of October 1950 in a middle-income family, but from the upper class. Her father was a wealthy industrialist, and then in 1932 began to pursue a successful political career, and then moved with his wife, the artist, from Mosul, a small city in northern Iraq, to Baghdad.
As a child, Hadid Zaha often traveled with his father along the remains of ancient Sumerian cities, at the same time a love of architecture arose in her. In the sixties, Zaha studied at elite boarding schools in England and Switzerland, and then entered the American University in Beirut, where she studied mathematics, carried away by the creations of Russian architects and the visual arts.
In 1972, thanks to the support of the family, parents and older brother Fulat, then a well-known writer and publicist, Zaha continued her education at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London. The student’s tremendous talent, creativity, and her attention to small details were noted by all her mentors, and many of them were famous. The student project of Zakha’s fourth year of study was a hotel in the form of a bridge from a painting by Malevich.
Career
Zaha began her professional career right after graduation, in 1977. She was invited to work in the office of the metropolitan architecture of Rotterdam. And after three years, having acquired her own unique style and invaluable experience in complex projects, Zaha opened her own company in London.
The unusual design of Hadid's creations has attracted widespread attention. She published her projects and drafts in many magazines, where she was called the representative of deconstructivism, neo-futurism. In fact, Zakha did not have a single style, each creation was unique. In the eighties, she began to teach architecture, first at her alma mater in London, and then at Harvard, the universities of Chicago and Cambridge without abandoning her main passion - the design of stately buildings.
Zakha’s ambitious, unusual, futuristic projects won many competitions, but not all were built due to financial considerations. On her account the Phaeno Science Center in German Wolfsburg, the building of the Cincinnati Center for Contemporary Art, the Guangzhou Opera House, the famous Sheikh Zayed Bridge, the famous Peresvet Plaza in the Russian capital and much more in Azerbaijan, Korea, Austria, Hong Kong, Belgium, Lithuania, Italy, USA …
The beauty of the architecture that Zaha created is characterized by the aesthetics of lightness and rationalism, the simplicity of lines and the thoroughness of details. “Light that has taken on form” is what they say about her creations today.
