Originally Published: 2009-11-29

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Hadid, 59, is a remarkable anomaly in the select world of internationally renowned architects. In 2004, she became the first female architect (and so far, only) to earn the prestigious Pritzker Prize for building design. Other winners over the prize’s 30 year history include famous practitioners such as Frank Gehry, Renzo Piano, and Aldo Rossi.
Pritzker juror Ada Louise Huxtable noted at the time of Hadid’s selection that the London architect’s work portfolio of “fragmented geometry and fluid mobility do more than create an abstract, dynamic beauty; this is a body of work that explores and expresses the world we live in.”
Along with MAXXI, Hadid’s vision of our world will soon include projects such as a new Guggenheim museum in Taiwan, an opera house in Guangzhou, China, and the new aquatics centre for the 2012 Summer Olympics in London.
“Architecture is about feeling good in a space and for that you have to have generosity of spirit,” says Hadid, who was born and raised in Baghdad, Iraq before she moved to London in the early 1970s to study architecture.
A committed modernist architect who calls upon both her honed artistry and the benefits of leading-edge computer modelling, Hadid says: “You can make things most people think impossible if you have an optimistic vision of the future.”

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