Zaha Hadid had a global impact in her career, in both built and unbuilt forms. Following a BSc in Mathematics from Beirut’s American University, Z. Hadid took a Diploma in Architecture at the Architectural Association (AA) in London, where she met architects and tutors Elia Zenghelis (1937–) and Rem Koolhaas (1945–) – later running theirAA Diploma 9 unit, set up to respond to contemporary issues by studying modernist art and architecture. She further partnered with Zenghelis and Koolhaas at the Office of Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), having won the AA Diploma Prize in 1977. Z. Hadid was committed to the importance of practitioners maintaining links within education, and taught architecture at the universities of Harvard, Chicago and Yale. In an era that saw a shift from architect as public servant to public performer, Z. Hadid was adamant that architecture was about collaboration, not individual expression. She established her London-based firm, Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA) in 1979.

Planetary Architecture Two, a major retrospective at the AA in 1983, celebrated her first major project, the competition-winning entry for Hong Kong’s The Peak Club. The exhibition catalogue shows a layered mock-up of the swimming pool and wall-size paintings of Hong Kong and Kowloon. The work indicates her process to translate two-dimensional representation into built work and the strong influence of modernist aesthetics and those of Russian avant-garde Suprematism. Ultimately unbuilt, this nonetheless formed the foundation for her career.

ZHA’s first built work, Vitra Fire Station (Weil am Rhein, 1983), demonstrated the Constructivist influence in her drawing and painting and how these design tools underpinned her practice. Z. Hadid was commissioned for the inaugural Serpentine pavilion (2000), an annual event for architects who have not previously built in the United Kingdom. In 2016, the Serpentine Sackler Gallery (2013), one of ZHA’s first permanent (and renovated) buildings in London, presented her exhibition Zaha Hadid: Early Paintings and Drawings. Reworking standard ideas of a tent or a marquee, angular flat planes extended to the ground created a sense of solidity, simultaneously enabling a multiplicity of internal spaces – a trope continued in projects such as Rome’s MAXXI art museum (2010), with its repertoire of spaces for curatorial experimentation and one of ZHA’s last projects to be conceived in 3D using paper, card and pens.

ZHA’s fluid undulating design for the Heydar Aliyev Center (2012), a cultural centre in Baku, Azerbaijan, showed a single continuous surface representing its multiple functions in its folds. It was subject to strong criticism about the ethics of working with unpalatable regimes; many architects are not confronted on this level, nor undermined with essentialisms of ethnicity, gender or religion.

Z. Hadid won multiple awards including the Royal Gold Medal for Architecture (2016), the Royal Institute of British Architect’s highest honour and was the first woman to be awarded thePritzker Architecture Prize in 2004, and also the London Design Museum’s Design of the Year in 2014 for the Heydar Aliyev Center. After her death, the square in Antwerp in front of the Port House designed by ZHA (2016) was renamed Zaha Hadidplein (Zaha Hadid Square).