Zaha Hadid was born October 31, 1950 in Baghdad, Iraq. She received a
degree in mathematics from the American University of Beirut before
moving to study at the Architectural Association School of Architecture
in London. After graduating she worked with her former teachers, Rem
Koolhaas and Elia Zenghelis at the Office for Metropolitan Architecture ,
becoming a partner in 1977. It was with Koolhaas that she met the
engineer Peter Rice who gave her support and encouragement early on, at a
time when her work seemed difficult to build. In 1980 she established
her own London-based practice. During the 1980s she also taught at the
Architectural Association. She has also taught at prestigious
institutions around the world; she held the Kenzo Tange Chair at the
Graduate School of Design, Harvard University, the Sullivan Chair at the
University of Illinois at Chicago School of Architecture, guest
professorships at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Hamburg, the
Knowlton School of Architecture, at The Ohio State University, the
Masters Studio at Columbia University , New York and the Eero Saarinen
Visiting Professor of Architectural Design at the Yale School of
Architecture , New Haven, Connecticut. In addition , she was made
Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and an
Honorary Fellow of the American Institute of Architects.[1] She is
currently Professor at the University of Applied Arts Vienna in Austria.
A
winner of many international competitions, theoretically influential
and groundbreaking, a number of Hadid's winning designs were initially
never built: notably , The Peak Club in Hong Kong ( 1983 ) and the
Cardiff Bay Opera House in Wales ( 1994 ). In 2002 Hadid won the
international design competition to design Singapore's one-north
masterplan. In 2005, her design won the competition for the new city
casino of Basel, Switzerland. In 2004 Hadid became the first female
recipient of the Pritzker Architecture Prize, architecture's equivalent
of the Nobel Prize. Previously, she had been awarded an CBE for services
to architecture. She is a member of the editorial board of the
Encyclopædia Britannica. In 2006, Hadid was honored with a retrospective
spanning her entire work at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. In that
year she also received an Honorary Degree from the American University
of Beirut. Zaha Hadid's architectural design firm - Zaha Hadid
Architects - is over 250 people strong, headquartered in London.
In
2008, she ranked 69th on the Forbes list of " The World ' s 100 Most
Powerful Women".[ 2 ] On January 2nd 2009, she was the guest editor of
the BBC's flagship morning radio news programme
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