Zaha Hadid

Zaha Hadid was born on 31 October 1950 in Baghdad, Iraq, to an upper-class Iraqi family. Her father, Muhammad al-Hajj Husayn Hadid, was a wealthy industrialist from Mosul. He co-founded the socialist al-Ahali group in 1932, a significant political organisation in the 1930s and 1940s. He also co-founded the National Democratic Party in Iraq and served as minister of finance after the 1958 Iraqi coup d'état, under the government of General Abd al-Karim Qasim. Her mother, Wajiha al-Sabunji, was an artist from Mosul and her brother, Foulath Hadid, was a writer, accountant and expert on Arab affairs. In an interview, Hadid recalled that early childhood trips to the ancient Sumerian cities in southern Iraq sparked her interest in architecture. In the 1960s, she attended boarding schools in England and Switzerland. Hadid was unmarried and had no children.

Broad Art Museum, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan, United States (2007–2012)

The Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan, Hadid's second project in the United States, has a space of 4,274 square metres, dedicated to contemporary art and modern art and an historical collection. The parallelogram-shaped building leans sharply and seems about to tip over. Hadid wrote that she designed the building so that its sloping pleated stainless steel facades would reflect the surrounding neighbourhood from different angles; the building continually changes colour depending upon the weather, the time of day and the angle of the sun. As Hadid commented, the building "awakens curiosity without ever truly revealing its contents". Elaine Glusac of The New York Times wrote that the architecture of the new museum "radicalizes the streetscape". The Museum was used in a scene of the 2016 Batman vs. Superman movie.

Library and Learning Center, Vienna University of Economics and Business, Vienna, Austria (2008–2013)

The Library and Learning Center was designed as the centrepiece of the new campus of the Vienna University of Economics and Business. Containing 28,000 square metres of space, its distinctive Hadid features include walls sloping at 35 degrees and massive black volume cantilevered at an angle over the plaza in front of the building. She described the interior as follows: "The straight lines of the building's exterior separate as they move inward, becoming curvilinear and fluid to generate a free-formed interior canyon that serves as the principal public plaza of the Center, as well as generating corridors and bridges ensuring smooth transitions between different levels."

Hadid studied mathematics at the American University of Beirut before moving, in 1972, to London to study at the Architectural Association School of Architecture. There she studied with Rem Koolhaas, Elia Zenghelis and Bernard Tschumi. Her former professor Koolhaas described her at graduation as "a planet in her own orbit." Zenghelis described her as the most outstanding pupil he ever taught. 'We called her the inventor of the 89 degrees. Nothing was ever at 90 degrees. She had spectacular vision. All the buildings were exploding into tiny little pieces." He recalled that she was less interested in details, such as staircases. "The way she drew a staircase you would smash your head against the ceiling, and the space was reducing and reducing, and you would end up in the upper corner of the ceiling. She couldn't care about tiny details. Her mind was on the broader picture—when it came to the joinery she knew we could fix that later. She was right." Her AA graduation thesis, Malevich's Tektonik, was a concept and design for a 14-level hotel on London's Hungerford Bridge executed as an acrylic painting, inspired by the works of the Suprematist artist Kazimir Malevich.

After graduation in 1977, she went to work for her former professors, Koolhaas and Zenghelis at the Office for Metropolitan Architecture in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Through her association with Koolhaas, she met the architectural engineer Peter Rice, who supported and encouraged her during the early stages of her career. Hadid became a naturalised citizen of the United Kingdom. She opened her own architectural firm, Zaha Hadid Architects, in London in 1980. During the early 1980s, Hadid introduced audiences to a new modern architectural style through her highly detailed and professional sketches. At a time when architectural focus was shifting toward postmodernism, her approach stood out and set apart from other designers.

She then began her teaching career at the Architectural Association and later held positions at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Cambridge University, the University of Chicago, the Hochschule für bildende Künste in Hamburg, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and Columbia University. She earned her early reputation through lecturing and radical, colourful designs and projects, which were widely published in architectural journals but largely remained unbuilt. Her ambitious but unrealized projects included The Peak in Hong Kong (1983) and a plan for an opera house in Cardiff, Wales, (1994). The Cardiff experience was particularly discouraging: although her design was selected as the best by the competition jury, the Millennium Commission, acting as funding body, refused to support it, and the project was awarded to another architect. Hadid responded to the decision by asking "Do they want nothing but mediocrity?". Her reputation during this period rested largely on her teaching and the imaginative, vibrant paintings she made of her proposed buildings.

Her international profile rose significantly in 1988 when she was selected as one of seven architects featured in the "Deconstructivism in Architecture" exhibition curated by Philip Johnson and Mark Wigley at New York's Museum of Modern Art. That exhibition, along with a conference at the Tate in London and increased press coverage, helped establish her name globally and allowed her work to be associated with a distinct architectural style.

Sky Park Residence I, II, III, IV, Bratislava, Slovakia (2016–2024)

Four identical 31-storey residential towers measuring 105 metres (355 ft) tall, in the Sky Park complex neighbouring Bratislava city centre. Although the project was presented in 2010, the construction on the project began in December 2016. The construction of the Sky Park Residence I, II and III was completed in 2020 and the construction of the fourth residential tower started in 2021 and was completed in 2024. All four towers housing 1,048 apartments.

In 2026, to mark the tenth anniversary of Hadid’s death, the Zaha Hadid Foundation reopened her former headquarters at 10 Bowling Green Lane in Clerkenwell, London, as a public cultural space for architecture, design and the related arts. The building, a Grade II-listed Victorian schoolhouse dating from the early 1870s, was renovated by Katherine Nolan and Alex Butterworth of the London-based Studio KA, and includes galleries, a learning space, a lecture hall and a collection display, and is intended to host exhibitions, talks, workshops and creative residencies.

Qatar controversy

As the architect of a stadium to be used for the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar, Hadid was accused in The New York Review of Books of giving an interview in which she allegedly showed no concern for the deaths of migrant workers in Qatar involved in the project. In August 2014, Hadid sued The New York Review of Books for defamation and won. Immediately thereafter, the reviewer and author of the piece in which she was accused of showing no concern issued a retraction in which he said "work did not begin on the site for the Al Wakrah stadium, until two months after Ms Hadid made those comments; and construction is not scheduled to begin until 2015... There have been no worker deaths on the Al Wakrah project and Ms Hadid's comments about Qatar that I quoted in the review had nothing to do with the Al Wakrah site or any of her projects. I regret the error."