Modern Baghdad flourishes
The 1950s Baghdad of Zaha Hadid’s childhood is a far cry from what we know of it today. Zaha went to a progressive school taught by Catholic nuns, but whose students were mostly Muslims, Jewish, and French. Everyone had the choice to pray or not to pray. Girls could play any sport; women did not wear veils; they worked as lawyers and in the government.

The economy was flourishing in its post-world war oil boom. In 1957, Prime Minister Ali Jawdat al-Aiyubi wanted to build a newer city. His son was a design student at Harvard, taught by the great Walter Gropius, the first chair professor of its Graduate School (Gropius founded the Bauhaus School in 1919, whose students and teachers included Mies Van der Rohe, Marcel Breuer, Hannes Meyer and others who would escape Nazi Germany to teach and build around the world, making the Bauhaus the single most influential institution in modern architecture and design). The Hadid’s home was itself in the Bauhaus style, the first modernist house in Baghdad.

In 1954, Gropius visited Baghdad and met with a group of intellectuals to discuss building a new university. In 1957, he was invited by the Prime Minister to come up with a master plan. This was not just one commission but a sprawling network that was to include over a hundred buildings from downtown to the Tigris, centered on an educational philosophy of open cultural integration for 12,000 students. Frank Lloyd Wright was to design the Opera House. Jose Luis Sert, who built in Barcelona, and Alvar Aalto, perhaps the greatest modernist in Scandinavia, were also invited. And, of course, Le Corbusier, who was to design a vast sports complex. The Prime Minister was intent on making Baghdad a more modern world.

Then becomes a more and more contentious place
But ensuing government coups would make the planning more and more precarious, and only Le Corbusier’s would be built later on as the Saddam Hussein Sports Complex, along with a fraction of Gropius’ designs. From 22 years worth of award-winning models (he planned until his death), only a fragmented handful of structures would be built, the “Open Mind Arch” at the entrance of the University among them, a symbol of its lost promise. Nonetheless, they were inspiring times in modernism and architecture. “We were brought up with that moment. There was an interest in education, an interest in architecture,” said Zaha.

Zara’s inspirations
When she was 9, Zaha designed her own room, “I wanted an adult’s room, not a kid’s room.” Her parents hired a craftsman to build the furniture, and afterward he copied her designs and sold them. Her cousin and aunt even asked her to design rooms for them. Decades later, she would remember the layout clearly – tiled floors and furniture with woven steel painted gold. She traveled with her parents often, discovering Rome’s Baroque structures, Madrid’s Moorish-inspired architecture, and, of course, the Sumer ruins in Iraq, the rivers and the dunes of the world’s oldest civilization, a beauty she would recreate in her buildings later on. By 11, she knew she wanted to be an architect, “In my generation, there were a lot of women who wanted to be in architecture, it was not uncommon, older generations were already practicing.”

After studying mathematics in Beirut, Zaha enrolled at the Architectural Association in London in 1972. They were experimental times, and there she discovered Russian painter Kazimir Malevich, who invented a new art form in 1913 called Suprematism – basic geometric forms that appear superimposed on a 2-dimensional plane. He also made 3-dimensional models he called architechtons – complex vertical miniatures that were supposed to explore lived-in spaces.

Vitra Fire Station (1993) Weil am Rhein, Germany

Zaha fell in love with his work and began to draw for hours, a habit she continued all her life. She used Malevich’s art, which explored geometry and aesthetics, as the basis for her designs. Her thesis  Malevich’s Tektonik garnered her AA’s Diploma Prize, an award given to only one student of the graduating class. All her future designs would be inspired by what she called “Suprematist geology. “It was also at AA that she found lifelong mentors in her teachers Elia Zenghelis and Rem Koolhaas. She became a partner in their firm OMA (known for 1980’s IJ Urban Plan to the more current Vertical Cities in Amsterdam and the CCTV in Beijing) before starting her own firm, ZHA – Zaha Hadid Architects – while also teaching at AA.

From “paper architect”
In 1983, Zaha won her first international competition. The design for a cliff-top resort for the Hong Kong Peak not only showcased Zaha’s talent as an artist and painter but also at imagining and drawing 3-dimensional spaces. It was an explosion of asymmetrical sharp angles, part chaos theory, part fractals, before this term was even used in architecture. Her design catapulted her to worldwide fame even though the project fell through because of China-Hong Kong relations.

For the next ten years, she was known only as a “paper architect” because her designs were too spectacular and complex that no one believed they could actually be built until the Vitra Fire Station was completed in 1993. It was commissioned by Vitra chief Rolf Fehlbaum, who became one of her lifelong supporters. The building is all concrete, with a triangular piece jutting out, somehow defying gravity. In between layered walls, the views seem to tilt – Zaha’s love of abstract art translated into real-life spaces. It is a marvel of construction, and Zaha finally proved that her designs were buildable.

Broad Art Museum (2012), MSU, East Lansing, MI

To master
After that she won competition after competition – the Cardiff Bay Opera House (beating out Norman Foster and 266 other entries), the Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati (the first museum in the U.S. designed by a woman), the Broad Museum in Michigan, the Bergisel Ski Jump and Nordpark Stations in Austria, the Science Center in Wolfsburg, the BMW Central Building in Leipzig, the Maxxi Museum in Rome, the Opera House in Guangzhou, a Cultural Center in Baku, and the London Aquatics Center.

The Cincinnati Art Center featured cantilevered levels, poured-in concrete floors, and 15-ton staircases (as much as the construction cranes could carry). It proved that Zaha was a serious builder rather than just an experimental architect, and it won her the American Architecture Award from The Chicago Athenaeum. For the four Nordpark stations, she studied natural formations specific to each area – glaciers, streams, and mountainsides – to make her designs part of the landscape.

The Opera House – her first design in China and its 3rd largest theater – is a fragmented shell shape to fit in a constantly changing city. This was followed by the river-like roof of the Maxxi Museum and the duned shape of the Baku Center, while the London Aquatics Center feels like an ocean wave built on a tripod.

For the Science Center, a concrete building lifted from the ground, her own construction engineers did not think it could be built. They had to develop software that could imitate and calculate gravity. It took two years before they could start to figure out a way to construct it. And to get it to stand required new structural building techniques they had to invent. And this is what made Zaha so ahead of her time. She never once compromised her designs, even when everyone kept telling her they were impossible to build. Instead, she pushed construction and engineering technology to advance faster to build them.

A new architecture
In the meantime, over 15 years, she helped invent Parametricism – a new design approach that takes in interior designing, buildings, environmental surroundings, and topography together. It uses computer software developed from animation techniques and algorithms to come up with real large-scale urban plans. Some of these look like her multi-layered drawings from over two decades ago, as if she had anticipated the technology. “Now we know through a computer that you can actually do the things I sketch,” she said.

Her legacy
When Zaha Hadid died on March 31, there was an outpouring of tributes from around the world, not just remembering her as a pioneer of such avant-garde architecture but as an inspiration. In 2004, she became the first woman and the first Muslim to win the Pritzker Prize, followed the RIBA Stirling Prize twice, Britain’s highest award in architecture. A student in Syria said that her graduating architecture class at Damascus University was 70% women.

But more than breaking down gender and cultural barriers, I think her most significant contribution is to architecture – designs so complex, they are inimitable. At the time of her death, ZHA had 36 projects in 21 countries. She not only believed in “manipulating geometry,” “creating new realities” and “seamless structures,” and in buildings that can float but actually built them by making even concrete look weightless. She designed in shapes and forms other minds could never have imagined.

Her death is devastating to architecture because no other architect came close to that imagination. And I don’t think anyone will for a very long time.