The first woman to receive the Pritzker Architecture Prize, along with the Stirling Prize. She was made a Dame by Elizabeth II for services to architecture.

Career

Zaha Hadid is from Baghdad, Iraq. She studied mathematics at the American University of Beirut before moving, to London to study at the Architectural Association School of Architecture.

After graduation, she went to work for her former professors, Koolhaas and Zenghelis, at the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. She then opened her own architectural firm, Zaha Hadid Architects, in London in 1980. Hadid's style introduced audiences to a new modern architecture style through her extremely detailed and professional sketches.

She then began her career teaching architecture, first at the Architectural Association, then, over the years at 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 with her lecturing and colorful and radical early designs and projects, which were widely published in architectural journals but remained largely unbuilt.