Zaha Hadid wearing the Royal Gold Medal. Photo: Sophie Mutevelian
We are inconsolable at the loss of the prodigious phenomenon, and generous friend, Zaha Hadid. Zaha catapulted into the architectural avant-garde in 1983 when she won the international competition for the Hong Kong Peak. Her astonishing paintings proposed a dynamic linearity that she would continuously advance. The Peak was not built and major work eluded her until construction of the space defining Vitra Fire Station in Weil am Rhine in 1994 whose stretched, layered walls she described as ?an ?alert? structure, ready to explode into action.?
The next year saw the most abysmal scandalous lily-livered commission fiasco, with the competition for the Cardiff Opera House in Wales, which has much to say about our era. Zaha?s brilliant proposal again won first prize but when the clients learned that the British architect had been born in Iraq and was also a woman, the project was aborted. Not until 2006 did Zaha receive significant public?but odd ball?commissions in the United Kingdom: the Evelyn Grace Academy in the tough Brixton south London borough (winner of the 2011 Sterling Prize) and the 2004-11 Riverside Transportation Museum, Glasgow Harbor, Scotland (Winner of the 2013 European Museum of the Year Award). By the time of this nascent recognition in Britain, Zaha had received the 2004 Pritzker Prize, the first woman to do so. The award cited major completed works?which, like Vitra and the Rosenthal Center fo...