Architecture · Contemporary
1950–2016 · Iraqi-British
Deconstructivism, then parametric design
The first woman to win the Pritzker Prize, and the architect who made the continuous curve buildable. Hadid spent two decades as a 'paper architect', her explosive painted perspectives admired and unbuilt, before computer modelling and fabrication caught up with her imagination. From the mid-2000s her practice produced a stream of swooping concrete and fibreglass buildings across Europe, China and the Gulf. She died suddenly in Miami in 2016, aged 65.
A 2012 Baku cultural centre whose white skin rises from the plaza in a single fold, with no straight lines and no visible columns (2012)
Baku, Azerbaijan
The Heydar Aliyev Center — Design of the Year 2014, the first architectural work to take the award
A Rome museum of 2010 where black concrete tubes of gallery cross and overhang one another, with a steel stair swinging through the void (2010)
Flaminio, Rome
MAXXI, the national museum of 21st-century arts — Stirling Prize 2010
A 2011 swimming venue with a wave-like roof on three supports, built for an Olympic Games with temporary side wings later removed (2011)
Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, London
The London Aquatics Centre for the 2012 Olympics
A pair of smooth granite-and-glass boulders of 2010 beside a Chinese river, likened to pebbles washed smooth by the water (2010)
Zhujiang New Town, Guangzhou, China
The Guangzhou Opera House — her first major building in China
A Glasgow transport museum of 2011 on the Clyde, its zigzag zinc roof profile running straight through the building from riverside to city (2011)
Glasgow, Scotland
The Riverside Museum — European Museum of the Year 2013
Her first completed building, a 1993 fire station of sharp angled concrete planes for a German furniture company, now used as a chair gallery (1993)
Weil am Rhein, Germany
The Vitra Fire Station — the factory's own brigade was disbanded soon after it opened
A 2005 science centre in Wolfsburg raised on ten hollow concrete cones, the whole building hovering above an open plaza (2005)
Wolfsburg, Germany
The Phaeno Science Center, built in self-compacting concrete
A 2002 Alpine ski jump combining tower, café and viewing terrace in one form likened to a stretched animal (2002)
Innsbruck, Austria
The Bergisel Ski Jump, her breakthrough built work in Europe