Zaha Hadid

An important force in 20th- and 21st-century architecture, Dame Zaha Mohammad Hadid DBE RA was a British-Iraqi architect, artist, and designer. This is one of The Most Famous Architects You Need To Know. Hadid, who was raised in Baghdad, Iraq, completed her undergraduate work in mathematics before enrolling in the Architectural Association School of Architecture in 1972. Hadid, inspired by Suprematism and the Russian avant-garde and seeking an alternative to traditional architectural drawing, used painting as a design tool and abstraction as a guiding principle to "reinvestigate the aborted and untested experiments of Modernism [...] to unveil new fields of building."

Zaha Hadid was one of the few women to achieve the status of starchitect and the first person to ever win the Pritzker Prize, architecture's equivalent of the Oscar. She was noted for her futuristic designs that used sweeping, curving shapes more appropriate for UFOs than structures. Born into a wealthy Iraqi family in Bagdad and educated in the UK (where the Queen would later bestow the title of "Dame," the feminine form of address for a knighthood), Hadid defied convention by forgoing the linear geometry typically used by architects in favor of an Expressionistic aesthetic that frequently seemed to allude to the female form—though not on purpose, according to Hadid herself: She brushed off the comparison of her stadium design in Qatar to a vagina as "embarrassing" and "stupid." Despite her enormous construction work throughout the world, she only has one completed project—a luxurious condo in Chelsea—in New York City.

In 2004, Hadid became the first female recipient of the Pritzker Architecture Prize. She was given the Stirling Prize, the most prestigious architectural honor in the UK, in 2010 and 2011. Elizabeth II made her a Dame in 2012 for her contributions to architecture, and she received the Royal Gold Medal from the Royal Institute of British Architects in February 2016, the month before she passed away. Ray Eames and Sheila O'Donnell had previously received it jointly with Charles Eames and John Tuomey, respectively.

Date of birth: 31 October 1950

Accomplishments: Vitra Fire Station, MAXXI, Bridge Pavilion, Contemporary Arts Center, Heydar Aliyev Center, Riverside Museum