Zaha Hadid was an Iraqi-born British architect and designer whose work transformed the language of contemporary architecture. Born in Baghdad in 1950, she studied mathematics at the American University of Beirut before moving to London in 1972 to attend the Architectural Association, where she graduated in 1977. After working with the Office of Metropolitan Architecture, she founded her own practice in London in 1980 and gradually established a body of work that challenged conventional ideas of structure, geometry, and space.
Over the decades, Hadid became internationally celebrated for buildings and objects defined by movement, complexity, and formal daring. In 2004, she became the first woman to receive the Pritzker Architecture Prize, and her career expanded across architecture, interiors, urbanism, and product design. The Zaha Hadid Foundation describes her as one of the most important architects of the modern period, credited with developing an entirely new architectural language through her pursuit of complex, dynamic, and fluid spaces. She died in 2016, leaving a legacy that continues to shape global design culture through both the foundation and Zaha Hadid Architects.
