News Item: : Pritzker Prize Winner: Zaha Hadid
(Category: International Events)
Posted by Webmaster
Friday 11 December 2009

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 Groninger ForumBurnham Pavilion


She is the first woman to win the Pritzker Prize. Her architecture has won many competitions and is now one of the most sought-after in the world. She has her place in architecture and product design, being named among the one hundred most powerful women in the world.

Born in Baghdad on October 31, 1950, Zaha Hadid graduated in mathematics at the American University of Beirut. After that she moved to London and began her course at the Architectural Association School of Architecture.

Zaha Hadid was taught by Rem Koolhaas and Elia Zenghelis, teachers and architects from the OMA - Office for Metropolitan Architecture. After her graduation in 1977, she was invited to join the office of her former teachers.

During the 80s, in the same way as her teachers, she taught at the Architectural Association and many other schools all over the world such as Harvard and the likes.

Influences

Zaha was greatly influenced, during the course of architecture and after graduation, by architect Rem Koolhaas. He was also the one who presented Zaha to engineer Peter Rice, who played an important role early on in her career.

Peter Rice encouraged and strengthened Zaha Hadid's concepts when her projects were seen with different eyes through the difficulty in their being built. She won many competitions, some not executed, but always generating controversy with her design solutions.

Works

She founded her own office in London in 1980. Her polemical works generate discussion around the world, but the fact is that her architecture is unique, which influences many young architects who follow the same chain. The truth is that her lines and concepts are clear and easy to identify in a split second.

In 2004, Zaha Hadid won the Pritzker Prize, becoming the first and only woman to receive the award. Last year, she was included in the Forbes list under "The World's 100 Most Powerful Women", justifying all the fame and commercial appeal that her name began to be producing for major companies in the world.

“Architecture is really about well-being. I think that people want to feel good in a space... On the one hand it’s about shelter, but it’s also about pleasure. The intention is to really carve out of a city civic spaces and the more it is accessible to a much larger mass in public and it’s about people enjoying that space. That makes life that much better. If you think about housing, education, whether schools and hospitals, these are all very interesting projects because in the way you interpret this special experience.”



This news item is from design educators forum of southern africa
( http://www.defsa.org.za/news.php?extend.27 )