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.
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, 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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
They were also sometimes deeply impractical, colossally expensive and seemingly indifferent to the program at hand.
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.
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.
“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.”
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.
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.
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.
Sorce: nytimes.com
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