ANNO

Zaha Hadid, founding partner of Zaha Hadid architects is the first woman to win the prestigious Pritzker Prize for Architecture in its 26 year history. Her single-mindedness and lack of compromise is well know throughout the industry and has served to create buildings of outstanding beauty.

Born in Baghdad in 1950 the Iraq Hadid grew up in was a very different one to what we know today. The Iraq of her childhood was a liberal, secular and western focussed society. Hadid received a mathematics degree from the American University of Beirut before going to study architecture at London’’s Architectural Association in 1972. This same institution produced graduates such as Rem Koolhaas, Daniel Libeskind and Bernanrd Tschumi.

Together with her senior partner Patrik Schumacher the firm is currently involved in projects such as the Aquatics Centre for the London 2012 Games, High Speed train stations in Naples and Durango and urban master plans in Beijing, Bilbao, Singapore and the Middle East.

The firm’s seminal buildings include The MAXXI: National Museum of 21st Centrury Art in Rome, the Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati, BMW’s Central Building in Leipzig and the Phaeno Science Centre in Wolfsburg.

Zaha Hadid Architects continues to be a leader in pioneering research and design investigation in collaboration with artists, designers, engineers. Undoubtedly, Hadid has cemented her reputation as one of the world’s most exciting and significant contemporary architects of our time. The practice’s implementation of state-of-the-art technologies have aided in the realization of beautiful fluid, dynamic and complex architectural structures..