Zaha Hadid



DBE زها حديد Zahā Ḥadīd; 31 October 1950 – 31 March 2016) was an Iraqi architect. She was the first woman to receive the Pritzker Architecture Prize, winning it in 2004. She received the Stirling Prize in 2010 and 2011. In 2012, she was created a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire and in 2015 she became the first woman to be awarded the RIBA Gold Medal in her own right.

Quotes

 * Technology's rapid development and our ever-changing lifestyles created a fundamentally new and exhilarating backdrop for building, and in this new world context I felt we must reinvestigate the aborted and untested experiments of Modernism – not to resurrect them, but to unveil new fields of building.
 * On her use of painting as investigative technique and her 1983 work The World (89 Degrees) in Zaha Hadid: Inspiration and Process in Architecture, 2011.
 * Having a period of - well, austerity, shall we say - certainly humbles you.
 * Quoted in the Evening Standard, Tue 1 May 2012, p. 16.