She attended convent schools in Baghdad and Switzerland, afterwards received a degree in mathematics at the American University in Beirut. Not until 1972 at the age of 22 she enroll into the Architectural Association in London. During the 70’s when pre-1968 optimistic modernism was being abandon, the AA was a hotspot for ambitious, independently minded aspired architects, such as Rem Koolhaas, and Will Alsop. It was the epicenter for a vital generation of architectural minds. The AA during this time period rejected kitsch post-modernism and aimed to become more modernist. They discarded failed Utopian projects and
She had her own ideas on architecture to nurture, which went through a long period incubation. She taught at AA, while developing her own brand of neo-modernist architecture. She went back to modernist roots in 20th century constructivism and suprematism. Her graduation project was a hotel on London’s Hungerford Bridge, called Malevich’s Tectonik, after Kashmir Malevich whom was a supremacist. She created landscape, which metaphorically, and perhaps in one day literally seemed to take off, which followed suit in Malevich’s quote “we can only perceive space when we break free from the earth, when the point of support disappears.”
Zaha Hadid born in 1950 in Baghdad, Iraq. Iraq at the time was an entirely different country then what it is today. Hadid grew up during a period when Iraq was flourishing, liberal, secular, and western focused. It was also during the time when Iraq’s economy was booming. Her family, which was high class, played a roll in the Ba’ath party, which took power in 1963. Her father, Mohammad Hadid, was a politician, economist and industrialist and a co-founder of the Iraqi National Democratic. He was also a leader of the Iraqi Progressive Democratic Parties. Her father became a role model and she believed that she could be equally ambitious, even as a female of Iraqi decent.
BIOGRAPHY