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Zaha Hadid, the Baghdad-born British architect, became in 2004 the first woman to win the Pritzker Prize, architecture's most prestigious award. Her sharply angled and flowing forms, first explored in paintings, widened what contemporary buildings could look like.

Zaha Hadid

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The story behind the card

For years Hadid was called a 'paper architect': her competition entries, such as The Peak, a club planned for a Hong Kong hillside that she won in 1983, drew wide praise but were not built. She worked out her ideas in large paintings that bent perspective on purpose, treating a building less as a fixed box than as a set of forces in motion. Her first completed building, a fire station for the Vitra furniture company in Weil am Rhein, Germany, opened in 1993. As computer modelling caught up with her drawings, projects such as the Heydar Aliyev Center in Baku (2012) and the London Aquatics Centre, built for the 2012 Olympics, showed her flowing forms at full scale. She died in 2016.

Türkçe oku
Bağdat doğumlu İngiliz mimar Zaha Hadid, 2004'te mimarlığın en saygın ödülü sayılan Pritzker'i kazanan ilk kadın oldu. Önce resimlerinde denediği keskin açılı ve akışkan biçimler, çağdaş binaların neye benzeyebileceğine dair sınırları genişletti.

Hadid uzun yıllar “kâğıt mimar” diye anıldı: 1983'te kazandığı, Hong Kong'da bir tepe yamacına planlanan The Peak kulübü gibi yarışma projeleri büyük ilgi gördü ama inşa edilmedi. Fikirlerini, perspektifi bilerek büküp çarpıttığı büyük resimlerde geliştirdi; binayı sabit bir kutudan çok, hareket hâlindeki kuvvetlerin bir bütünü olarak düşündü. Tamamlanan ilk yapısı, Almanya'nın Weil am Rhein kentinde Vitra mobilya şirketi için tasarladığı itfaiye binasıydı ve 1993'te açıldı. Bilgisayarla modelleme onun çizimlerine yetiştikçe, Bakü'deki Haydar Aliyev Merkezi (2012) ve 2012 Olimpiyatları için yapılan Londra Su Sporları Merkezi gibi projeler bu akışkan biçimlerin gerçek ölçekte de kurulabildiğini gösterdi. Hadid 2016'da öldü.

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Background reading: Zaha Hadid
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