Zaha Hadid

Bio:
Dame Zaha Hadid (born Zaha Mohammed Hadid on October 31, 1950 in Baghdad, Iraq) was an Iraqi-British architect. Zaha grew up in Iraq, living one of the country’s first Bauhaus-inspired buildings. Her love for architecture flourished while she studied mathematics at the American University of Beirut, before moving to London to study at the Architectural Association School of Architecture. After graduating in 1977, she joined the Office of Metropolitan Architecture in Rotterdam. In the 1980s, she established her own London based practice and taught at the Architectural Association. Though her ideas won her design contests, her first major building wasn’t constructed until 1993, a small fire station in Rhein, Germany. Her designs for the IBA Housing in Berlin, the Mind Zone exhibition in London and the Land Formation One exhibition space in Weil am Rhein gained her international fame. In 2004, Zaha became the first female and the first Muslim to win the Pritzker Architecture Prize, what is considered to be the Nobel prize of architecture. In 2002, she was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire and in 2012, she was named a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. On March 31, 2016, Zaha died from a heart attack while she was being treated for bronchitis in a Miami hospital.

Best Known For:
Dame Zaha Hadid was best known as an architect who won the Pritzker Prize in 2004.

Personal Life:
Zaha was criticized for designing the stadium to be used in the 2022 FIFA World Cup, as the project imposed miserable working conditions on migrant workers in Qatar. She sued the New York Review of Books for defamation over an article which accused her of “showing no concern” for the workers death.