Zaha Hadid

Born in Baghdad in 1950, daughter of an esteemed and well-known Iraqi industrialist she was lucky enough to be born into a cultured and open-minded family. She graduated in mathematics at A.U. of Beirut in Lebanon and then continued her studies in London graduating in 1972 in architecture. Her cultural training largely belongs to the deconstructivist movement which proposes a continuous spaciality, in which the use of all the traditional elements dissolve in a single fluid surface, in architectural skin which presents itself with continuous distortions, fractures and fray in a language of an organic type.

"I have always been interested in the concept of fragmentation and the idea of abstraction and exploision, deconstructing the ideas of repetitiviness and mass production"

Her architectural concepts have acquired feasibility thanks to another industrial revelation based on digital design and CNC machines. For example numerically controlled machines that have the advantage of reducing the time and cost. Her architecture is defined as parametric architecture, a new current of modern architecture that aims to manage complex geometries through the use of a few elements that are translated into mathematical terms. For Zaha Hadid, painting played an extremely important role in her education, she was fascinated by the artistic avant-guards such as Malevich, Mondrian and Rietveld, by the entire Bauhaus movement and by late Russian deconstructivism. 

Drawing is the basis of her planning, her paintings present a disarticulation of forms conceived as fragmentations of signs, with superimposed geometries and a spatiality underlined by the use of color.  Another characterizing element is that of always creating a closed link with the landscape, her architecture seems like flows of energy that fit into the urban area. The use of white exposed concrete will become the stylistic hallmark of all her projects. This material allows her to create her architecture as if it was a sculpture.