Zaha Hadid, a visionary Iranian born architect, has passed away. At just 65 years old, Hadid died from a massive heart attack while being treated for bronchitis.
What made Hadid’s impact in her field so impressive was that not only was she a woman in a male dominated industry, she revolutionized architecture in the modern age.
According to The NY Times, Ms. Hadid contracted bronchitis earlier this week and suffered a sudden heart attack while being treated in the hospital, her office, Zaha Hadid Architects in London, said.
She was not just a rock star and a designer of spectacles. She also liberated architectural geometry, giving it a whole new expressive identity. Geometry became, in her hands, a vehicle for unprecedented and eye-popping new spaces but also for emotional ambiguity. Her buildings elevated uncertainty to an art, conveyed in the odd ways one entered and moved through those buildings and in the questions her structures raised about how they were supported.
Her work, with its formal fluidity — also implying mobility, speed, freedom — spoke to a worldview widely shared by a younger generation. “I am non-European, I don’t do conventional work and I am a woman,” she once told an interviewer. “On the one hand all of these things together make it easier — but on the other hand it is very difficult.”
In 2004 Hadid became the first woman to win the Pritzker Prize, architecture’s Nobel and the first, on her own, to be awarded the RIBA Gold Medal, Britain’s top architectural award, in 2015.
May she rest in peace.
