Seven years after the unexpected death of the British-Iraqi architect Zaha Hadid, we cannot but remember how her example influenced international architecture. It is no coincidence that she is considered the main inspirer of contemporary design alongside a generation of male architects with whom she contributed to a redefinition of design forms.
Always original and never predictable, her designs embraced angular shapes and sinuous lines that echoed modernist paintings. These were very different from the classic rectangular shapes that were still so central to architectural design at the time. Zaha advocated these new forms in a rejection of the way architecture had been designed in the past, where randomness and arbitrariness are central to her texts explaining how her own work contains randomness, but also logic and forethought. These are characteristics not found in arbitrariness. She argued that it was necessary to ‘create a new dynamic of architecture in which the earth is partially occupied, thus understanding the fundamental principles of liberation’.
Today, the forms of his architectural designs are iconic. We can see them all over the world, from Europe to the Middle East to Asia. Hadid became a role model for many simply by pursuing the kind of career she wanted until she became a famous woman whose greatness was recognised worldwide and sought after for the originality of her designs.
In 2004, Hadid became the first woman to receive the Pritzker Architecture Prize. Only six women have received the award to date.
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