Architect Dame Zaha Hadid, one of the most famous architects of our time, has died following a heart attack while on treatment for bronchitis in a Miami Hospital.
The British designer, born in Iraq, has designed some of the world’s most famous buildings like the Sleuk Rith Institute and Heydar Aliyev Center. Zaha was the first woman to receive the Royal Institute of British Architects Gold Medal.
A very sad day for the architecture fraternity.
Architect Daniel Libeskind has led the tributes following Zaha’s passing on. He posted on Twitter:
Devastated by the loss of a great architect & colleague today. Her spirit will live on in her work and studio. Our hearts go out. #zahahadid
— Studio Libeskind (@DanielLibeskind) 31 March 2016
Architect Zaha Hadid was also the first woman to ever win the Pritzker Prize. Her building, Heydar Aliyev Centre won the Design Museum Design of the Year Award in 2014, also making her the first woman to win the top prize in that competition.
Her company, Zaha Hadid Architects, just released the following lengthy statement in which they explain that she contracted bronchitis in the early hours of the morning, but passed on following a sudden heart attack in a Miami hospital:
ZAHA HADID 1950-2016
It is with great sadness that Zaha Hadid Architects have confirmed that Dame Zaha Hadid, DBE died suddenly in Miami in the early hours of this morning. She had contracted bronchitis earlier this week and suffered a sudden heart attack while being treated in hospital.
Zaha Hadid was widely regarded to be the greatest female architect in the world today. Born in Baghdad in 1950, she studied mathematics at the American University of Beirut before starting her architectural journey in 1972 at the Architectural Association in London.
By 1979 she had established her own practice in London – Zaha Hadid Architects – garnering a reputation across the world for her ground-breaking theoretical works including The Peak in Hong Kong (1983), the Kurfürstendamm in Berlin (1986) and the Cardiff Bay Opera House in Wales (1994).
Working with office partner Patrik Schumacher, her interest was in the interface between architecture, landscape, and geology; which her practice integrates with the use of innovative technologies often resulting in unexpected and dynamic architectural forms.
Zaha Hadid’s first major built commission, one that affirmed her international recognition, was the Vitra Fire Station in Weil Am Rhein, Germany (1993); subsequent notable projects including the MAXXI: Italian National Museum of 21st Century Arts in Rome (2009), the London Aquatics Centre for the 2012 Olympic Games (2011) and the Heydar Aliyev Centre in Baku (2013) illustrate her quest for complex, fluid space. Buildings such as the Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati (2003) and the Guangzhou Opera House in China (2010) have also been hailed as architecture that transforms our ideas of the future with visionary spatial concepts defined by advanced design, material and construction processes.
In 2004, Zaha Hadid became the first woman to be awarded the Pritzker Architecture Prize. She twice won the UK’s most prestigious architecture award, the RIBA Stirling Prize: in 2010 for the MAXXI Museum in Rome, a building for the staging of 21st century art, the distillation of years of experimentation, a mature piece of architecture conveying a calmness that belies the complexities of its form and organisation; and the Evelyn Grace Academy, a unique design, expertly inserted into an extremely tight site, that shows the students, staff and local residents they are valued and celebrates the school’s specialism throughout its fabric, with views of student participation at every turn.
Zaha Hadid’s other awards included the Republic of France’s Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, Japan’s Praemium Imperiale and in 2012, Zaha Hadid was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. She was made Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and Fellow of the American Institute of Architecture.
She held various academic roles including the Kenzo Tange Chair at the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University; the Sullivan Chair at the University of Illinois, School of Architecture. Hadid also taught studios at Columbia University, Yale University and the University of Applied Arts in Vienna.
Zaha Hadid
was recently awarded the RIBA’s 2016 Royal Gold Medal, the first woman to be awarded the prestigious honour in her own right.
Details of Zaha Hadid’s memorial service will be announced shortly.