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Innovative Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid dies at 65 Zaha Hadid, Pritzker-winning architect of defiance and drama, dies at 65
(about 9 hours later)
LONDON — Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid, whose modernist, futuristic designs included the swooping aquatic center for the 2012 London Olympics, has died at age 65. She leaves a string of bold, often beautiful and sometimes controversial buildings around the world. Zaha Hadid, the first woman to win the Pritzker Prize, architecture’s highest honor, and whose celebrated designs incorporated sweeping curves, open spaces and a complex sculptural fluidity, died March 31 at a Miami hospital. She was 65.
Hadid’s firm said she died Thursday in a Miami hospital. She had contracted bronchitis earlier this week and had a heart attack while being treated. Her architecture firm announced her death, saying she had contracted bronchitis earlier this week and had a heart attack while being treated.
In London, where she lived and worked, Mayor Boris Johnson tweeted that “she was an inspiration and her legacy lives on in wonderful buildings” at the Olympic park and around the world. The Iraqi-born Ms. Hadid was once derided as a “paper architect” whose designs were visually impressive but seldom built. In recent years, after winning the Pritzker Prize in 2004, she became one of the busiest and most influential architects in the world.
Born and raised in Baghdad, Hadid studied mathematics at the American University of Beirut before enrolling at the Architectural Association in London in 1972. Among other projects, she designed the aquatic center for the 2012 Olympic Games in London, museums in Cincinnati, Glasgow and Rome, an auto plant in Germany and an opera house in China.
She worked for the groundbreaking Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas before setting up London-based Zaha Hadid Architects in 1979. “Among architects emerging in the last few decades,” architect Richard Rogers told Britain’s Guardian newspaper, “no one had any more impact than she did.”
Hadid’s work fused her knowledge of mathematics and embrace of computer technology with soaring imagination and ambition. As one of the few women prominent in the masculine world of architecture, Ms. Hadid struggled for years to gain recognition. She adopted a formidable, even flamboyant personal style that matched her uncompromising approach to her art.
She designed buildings around the world — though relatively few, she often noted, were in Britain. Her projects included an innovative BMW plant in Leipzig, Germany; sleek funicular railway stations in Innsbruck, Austria; the glittering Guangzhou Opera House in China; Rome’s light-filled MAXXI museum for contemporary arts and architecture; and the strikingly curved Heydar Aliyev Center in Baku, Azerbaijan. “God forbid that a woman should have an idea about anything,” she told CBS News in 2005.
Her buildings were always talking points, and sometimes controversial. The Dongdaemun Design Plaza in Seoul was compared by detractors to an ugly spaceship that had made an emergency landing. Last year the Japanese government revoked her commission to build the stadium for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics amid spiraling costs. Ms. Hadid was not a utilitarian designer of the square-box school, but rather believed that architecture should be an expressive art form in its own right.
Uncompleted works include one of the stadiums for the 2022 World Cup in Qatar and a new Iraqi parliament building in Baghdad. “I don’t think that architecture is only about shelter, is only about a very simple enclosure,” she told Newsweek in 2011. “It should be able to excite you, to calm you, to make you think.”
Hadid twice won Britain’s Stirling Prize for architecture and in 2004 became the first woman to win the Pritzker Prize, known as the “Nobel prize of architecture.” Ms. Hadid courted controversy throughout her career, beginning when she was told that her early designs — often rendered as semi-abstract paintings — could not be built. With the help of computers, she proved that her flowing, irregularly shaped spaces followed sound engineering principles and would not collapse under their own weight.
The Pritzker jury praised her unswerving commitment to modernism and defiance of convention. [Zaha Hadid’s mixed architectural legacy.]
Like all architects, Hadid sometimes struggled to have her ambitious designs built. She acknowledged that some of her early plans had posed engineering challenges. Yet some of her most distinguished designs exist only on paper, and several museum exhibitions have featured her work as if she were a painter, not a builder.
“I used to like buildings floating,” Hadid told the BBC last month. “Now I know that they can’t float.” In 1994, Ms. Hadid entered a contest to design an opera house in Cardiff, Wales. Her creation was described in sensuous detail by New York Times critic Herbert Muschamp: “Curving glass facades wrap the perimeter of the waterfront site, while the jewel’s ‘facets’ — rhomboid-shaped volumes containing workshops, rehearsal halls and other spaces — are clustered like crystals around an inner courtyard.”
She was also unremittingly blunt and forthright — qualities not always relished in British society. Ms. Hadid won the contest, but her opera house never got beyond the model and design stage. An athletic stadium was built instead.
Earlier this year she was awarded the Gold Medal by the Royal Institute of British Architects. Architect Peter Cook said in his citation that “in our culture of circumspection and modesty her work is certainly not modest, and she herself is the opposite of modest.” In 2003, Ms. Hadid completed her first building in the United States, the Richard and Lois Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati. Set in a small space on a street corner, the museum is built as a set of interlocking concrete blocks.
“Such self-confidence is easily accepted in filmmakers and football managers, but causes some architects to feel uncomfortable,” he said. “Maybe they’re secretly jealous of her unquestionable talent.” The outdoor sidewalk extends through a glass wall into the interior, creating an “urban carpet,” in Ms. Hadid’s words. Inside, soaring stairways slice through the atrium like angled works of sculpture.
Although Hadid said she felt something of an outsider in British architecture — a woman, a foreigner and an innovator — she was made a dame, the female equivalent of a knight, by Queen Elizabeth II in 2012. “Teetering always on the edge of imbalance,” Washington Post architecture critic Benjamin Forgey wrote, “these intersections show Hadid at her brilliant best, challenging and appealing to mind and spirit as well as the senses.”
“I’m not against the establishment, per se,” she told the BBC. “I just do what I do and that’s it.” Muschamp called the Cincinnati museum “the most important American building to be completed since the end of the cold war.”
___ Architecture enthusiasts took note, and Ms. Hadid became more than a curiosity, more than a sculptor of uninhabited volumes. She won the Pritzker, often called the Nobel Prize of architecture, and commissions poured into her London office from around the world.
An earlier version of this story misspelled the name of architect Rem Koolhaas. She designed an office and factory complex for BMW in Leipzig, Germany; a cultural center in Baku, Azerbaijan; the London Aquatics Center for the 2012 Olympics; an opera house in Guangzhou, China; and perhaps most memorably, the MAXXI museum of contemporary art in Rome.
Copyright 2016 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Ms. Hadid did not have a signature style, but there were some characteristics that many of her buildings had in common: Walls were seldom vertical; few columns were in view; floors and hallways were often curved; and stairways seemed to float in space. In addition to buildings, she tried her hand at other forms of design, including furniture, jewelry and pottery.
In a 2009 New Yorker interview, Ms. Hadid was asked whether her designs for museums overpowered the art housed within.
“If you think the museum should be a white box, then I suppose you might see it that way,” she replied. “But art through the centuries has been displayed in baroque palaces, and in churches, and people don’t say that takes away from it.”
Zaha Mohammad Hadid was born Oct. 31, 1950, in Baghdad. Her father was a wealthy businessman, a key figure in a progressive wing of Iraqi politics and a minister of finance before the regime of Saddam Hussein.
Ms. Hadid was allowed to design her bedroom as a child and decided to become an architect when she was 11. She received a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from the American University in Beirut, then moved to London to study at the Architectural Association School of Architecture. By the time she graduated in 1977, she had studied with such renowned architects as Bernard Tschumi, Daniel Libeskind and Rem Koolhaas.
She opened an architecture studio in London in 1979. After struggling for years, she employed more than 400 people at the time of her death and was designing office buildings, museums, airports and concert halls around the globe.
Her unfinished projects include a new Iraqi parliament building and the Iraqi central bank in Baghdad.
Ms. Hadid was also commissioned to build two prominent athletic stadiums, one in Tokyo for the 2020 Summer Olympics and another in Qatar for the 2022 World Cup of soccer. Both projects were fraught with difficulty.
In Tokyo, architects and critics mocked the design, saying it resembled either a bicycle helmet or a toilet. Dmonstrators took the streets in protest, costs escalated, and the stadium project was scrapped last year.
In Qatar, Ms. Hadid faced heated criticism when it was revealed that hundreds of construction workers had died while building the soccer stadium. She said she had nothing to do with the contractors in Qatar, and she filed a defamation suit against a writer for the New York Review of Books who implied she bore responsibility for the deaths.
Ms. Hadid was constantly on the move around the world, overseeing her various projects and accepting the acclaim and celebrity that finally came her way. Over the years, she taught at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Harvard University, Columbia University and elsewhere around the globe.
She had no immediate survivors.
People who encountered Ms. Hadid said she resembled her buildings in the sense that both pulsated with an energy that could not be contained by four walls.
“We don’t make nice little buildings,” she once said. “People think that the most appropriate building is a rectangle, because that’s typically the best way of using space. But is that to say that landscape is a waste of space? The world is not a rectangle.”
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