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Zaha Hadid, Groundbreaking Architect, Dies at 65 Zaha Hadid, Groundbreaking Architect, Dies at 65
(about 4 hours later)
Zaha Hadid, the Iraqi-British architect whose curving, elongated structures left a mark on skylines around the world, and who was the first woman to win the Pritzker Prize, her profession’s highest honor, died in Miami on Thursday. She was 65. Dame Zaha Hadid, the Iraqi-born British architect whose soaring structures left a mark on skylines and imaginations around the world and in the process reshaped architecture for the modern age, died in Miami on Thursday. She was 65.
Ms. Hadid “contracted bronchitis earlier this week and suffered a sudden heart attack while being treated in hospital,” her office, Zaha Hadid Architects in London, said in a statement. Ms. Hadid contracted bronchitis earlier this week and suffered a sudden heart attack while being treated in the hospital, her office, Zaha Hadid Architects in London, said.
Ms. Hadid, renowned for her theoretical work, created designs that were so complex that for the first few decades of her practice, many of her more ambitious projects were never realized, even as she gained a dedicated following among her colleagues. She was not just a rock star and a designer of spectacles. She also liberated architectural geometry, giving it a whole new expressive identity. Geometry became, in her hands, a vehicle for unprecedented and eye-popping new spaces but also for emotional ambiguity. Her buildings elevated uncertainty to an art, conveyed in the odd ways one entered and moved through those buildings and in the questions her structures raised about how they were supported.
Her completed projects include the Heydar Aliyev Center in Baku, Azerbaijan (2013); Guangzhou Opera House in China (2010); the London Aquatics Center, built for the 2012 Olympic Games; Maxxi, a contemporary art museum in Rome (2009); the Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati (2003); and the Vitra Fire Station in Weil Am Rhein, Germany (1993). Her work, with its formal fluidity — implying mobility, speed, freedom, uncertainty — spoke to a worldview widely shared by a younger generation. “I am non-European, I don’t do conventional work and I am a woman,” she once told an interviewer. “On the one hand all of these things together make it easier — but on the other hand it is very difficult.”
Ms. Hadid was a path breaker. Along with being the first woman to win the Pritzker, she was the first to be awarded the RIBA Gold Medal, Britain’s top architecture prize, which came in 2015. Strikingly, Ms. Hadid never allowed herself or her work to be pigeonholed by her background or her gender. Architecture was architecture: it had its own reasoning and trajectory. And she was one of a kind, a path breaker. In 2004, she became the first woman to win the Pritzker Prize, architecture’s Nobel; the first, on her own, to be awarded the RIBA Gold Medal, Britain’s top architectural award, in 2015.
She was also a role model and inspiration for generations of young architects, men and women, who wanted to become Ms. Hadid: an architect of boundless ambition, a celebrity, and an artist with big ideas who won commissions for some of the world’s big, flashiest projects by the sheer force of her intelligence, creativity and personality. Inevitably, she stirred nearly as much controversy as she won admiration, provoking protests from human rights advocates when her $250 million cultural center in Baku, Azerbaijan, forced the eviction of families from the site. A commission to design a stadium in Qatar — a sensuous plan that more than a few observers likened to female anatomy — became, in truth unfairly, a lightning rod for critics who decry the treatment of foreign laborers by the government there. After winning the competition to design a new stadium for the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo, Ms. Hadid’s firm was fired by Japanese authorities, over accusations about looming cost overruns, a decision Ms. Hadid loudly declared unjust and political.
Ms. Hadid epitomized an era when architects became global brands. Her brand promised buildings of extravagant sculptural invention, spectacles of curving, swooping, unprecedented forms. She represented the epitome of the art of so-called parametric design, by which architects, aided by sophisticated computer programs, could animate buildings into new shapes. Zaha Hadid was born in Baghdad on Oct. 31, 1950. Her father was an industrialist, educated in London, who headed a progressive party advocating for secularism and democracy in Iraq. Baghdad was a cosmopolitan hub of modern ideas, which clearly shaped her upbringing. She attended a Catholic school where students spoke French, and Muslims and Jews were welcome. After that, she studied mathematics at the American University in Beirut (she would later say her years in Lebanon were the happiest of her life).
Museum galleries were no longer boxes. Their walls angled, their floors tilted. Ms. Hadid mixed Baroque ideas about extravagance and form with Futuristic and Cubist ideas about how to fracture and rearrange those forms. The results were often thrilling. Then, in 1972, she arrived at the Architectural Association in London, a center for experimental design. Her teachers included Elia Zenghelis and Rem Koolhaas. They “ignited my ambition,” she would recall, and “taught me to trust even my strangest intuitions.”
They were also sometimes deeply impractical, colossally expensive and seemingly indifferent to the program at hand. Ms. Hadid’s intuitions led her, among other directions, toward the Russian avant-garde, and its leaders: Vladimir Tatlin, El Lissitzky and Kazimir Malevich. Her graduation project at the Architectural Assocation, called Malevich’s Tectonik, was a proposal for a hotel atop Hungerford Bridge over the Thames.
Her design for the main facility for the 2020 Olympic Games, projected to be the most expensive of its kind, was scrapped last summer in a dispute over spiraling costs for the Tokyo games. It was originally expected to cost $2.5 billion, more than twice the $1.1 billion allocated for the stadium. For a while she worked at Mr. Koolhaas’s Office for Metropolitan Architecture, in Rotterdam, a cutting-edge firm and crucible for gifted young architects. By the 1980s she had established her own practice in London. And she began to draw attention with an unrealized plan in 1982-83 for the Peak Club, a private club in the hills of Kowloon, in Hong Kong.
Ms. Hadid also designed an apartment block that will soon border the High Line, the elevated park in Manhattan. The building, which is at 520 West 28th Street and which was to be Ms. Hadid’s first residential project in New York City, is to be completed by the end of this year or early next year. Ms. Hadid’s concept was a jagged, gravity-defying composition of beams and floating shards cantilevered into the rock face. It encapsulated the 1980s movement called Deconstructivism. During these years Ms. Hadid turned out an astonishing, super-refined variety of futuristic drawings and paintings. She used her art to test spatial ideas that she couldn’t yet make concrete without the aid of computer algorithms. She soon developed an insiders’ reputation as a leading theoretical designer of groundbreaking forms with unrealized projects like the Cardiff Bay opera house in Wales.
“Clients, journalists, fellow professionals are mesmerized by her dynamic forms and strategies for achieving a truly distinctive approach to architecture and its settings,” the Pritzker jury wrote in 2004, when she was awarded the prize. “Each new project is more audacious than the last and the sources of her originality seem endless.” Getting her designs built was something else.
Born in Baghdad in 1950, Ms. Hadid studied mathematics at the American University of Beirut before starting her architectural studies in 1972, at the Architectural Association in London. By 1979, she had established her own practice. She was also a partner in the Office of Metropolitan Architecture with Rem Koolhaas. Her many appointments included teaching roles at Harvard, Yale, Columbia, the University of Illinois, the University of Applied Arts in Vienna and other institutions. In 1994, her first real commission came along, a fire station in Weil am Rhein, Germany. It inspired a design of typically outsized imagination: a winged composition, all sharp angles and protrusions. Architects were impressed. The firefighters, not so much. They moved out, and the station became an event space.
Among her many honors were France’s Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and Japan’s Praemium Imperiale. In 2012, she was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. She was also an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and fellow of the American Institute of Architects. She always stuck to her guns, and, early on, made the most, creatively speaking, of what commissions she got. When her Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati, a relatively modest project, opened in 2003, Herbert Muschamp, then architecture critic for The New York Times, declared it “the most important American building to be completed since the end of the Cold War.”
While many of her most notable buildings were designed outside of her native country, she was selected to design new headquarters for the central bank and Parliament complex in Iraq. Neither project has been completed. The center can, he said, “be experienced as an exercise in heightening the mind-body connection.” It “presents vantage points of sufficient variety to keep photographers snapping happily for many years to come,” he added.
A full obituary will follow. Projects followed, like the Phaeno Science Center in Wolfsburg, Germany; the Bridge Pavilion in Zaragoza, Spain; and an opera house in Guangzhou, China, whose rock crystal-shaped design she likened to “pebbles in a stream smoothed by erosion.”
Her sources were nature, history, whatever she thought useful. Ms. Hadid’s design for the Maxxi, a modern art museum in Rome, alluded distantly to Baroque precedents, and became one of the rare modern buildings in the city to vie for attention with its numerous historical sites. Like the fire station it wasn’t entirely practical, but it was a voluptuous and muscular building, multi-tiered, with ramps that flowed like streams and floors tilted like hills, many walls swerving and swooning.
It took years before Ms. Hadid won major commissions in Britain, where she had became a citizen and established a thriving office. Her Aquatics Center in London, built for the 2012 Olympics, was a cathedral for water sports, with an undulating roof and two 50-meter pools. It has become a city landmark and neighborhood attraction, bustling with kids and recreational swimmers.
Her partner at Zaha Hadid Architects, Patrik Schumacher, played an instrumental and collaborative role in her career. Mr. Schumacher coined the term parametric design to encompass the computer-based approach that helped the firm’s most extravagant concepts become reality. Ms. Hadid called what resulted “an organic language of architecture, based on these new tools, which allow us to integrate highly complex forms into a fluid and seamless whole.”
Robert A.M. Stern, the dean of the Yale Architecture School, where Ms. Hadid was a visiting professor this semester, described the legacy on Thursday as “an architecture that I could never have imagined, much less imagined getting built.” He remembered her as “the master of a cutting remark about another architect’s work, but also astonishingly warm, generous and radiant,” he said. “She was like the sun.”
Ms. Hadid embodied, in its profligacy and promise, the era of so-called starchitects, who roamed the planet in pursuit of their own creative genius, offering miracles, occasionally delivering. “She was bigger than life, a force of nature,” as Amale Andraos, the dean of Columbia University’s architecture school, put it on Thursday. “She was a pioneer.”
She was. For women, for what cities can aspire to build and for the art of architecture.