Zaha Hadid was born in Baghdad in 1950 to an industrialist and politician father who served as Iraq’s finance minister and an artist mother. Family trips to Sumerian ruins in southern Iraq, where sand, water, and mud brick seemed to flow together, shaped her lifelong interest in architecture that grows from the land. She studied mathematics at the American University of Beirut, then in 1972 entered London’s Architectural Association, where she banished the right angle and sometimes left out practical details like usable staircases. After working in Rotterdam she opened her own London firm in 1980 and spent over a decade as a paper architect, known for teaching and for paintings of shattered, intersecting volumes, featured in MoMA’s 1988 deconstructivism exhibition.

In 1994 she won a competition for an opera house in Cardiff, Wales, only for the funding body to give the project to another architect. Her breakthrough was the Vitra fire station in Germany, commissioned in 1993, cast in custom concrete formwork with no right angles. A ski jump in Austria and the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati followed, and in 2004 she became the first woman to win the Pritzker Prize. She died of a heart attack in Miami in March 2016 at 65, and Zaha Hadid Architects finished her projects, including a starfish-shaped Beijing airport.

• The Cincinnati center made her the first woman to design an art museum in the United States
• She insisted her team hand draw and paint concepts first so software would not limit their imagination
• The pebble-shaped Guangzhou Opera House rests on a triangulated steel space frame
• Rome’s MAXXI used self-compacting concrete, and the London Aquatics Centre’s wave roof rests on three concrete supports
• Critics faulted a Glasgow transport museum that hung cars too high to see into, and commissions in Azerbaijan and Qatar