Zaha Hadid.

• Author: Law, Violet
• Position: THE PROGRESSIVE INTERVIEW - Interview

Even if she were not in such a male-dominated profession as architecture, Zaha Hadid, fifty-seven, would still have cut a figure by the sheer force of personality and singular vision driving her work over the last quarter-century. The Baghdad-born British architect is intent on rebelling. Her ambition has been to create space--dynamic, organic space--that not only suits contemporary life but also stimulates human activities.

When her career was budding in London, in the '80s, Hadid's nuanced and incisive understanding of what ideals modern architecture should aspire to did not serve her well at all. She faced derision and contempt. No one dared build her competition-winning designs. Many predicted that this nonconformist would soon drop out of the hidebound architecture world.

But shortly after she completed her initial North America commission, the Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati, she became the first woman and the youngest person to have ever won the Pritzker Prize, the equivalent of the Nobel in architecture, in 2004. Said juror Karen Stein, "The work, like the person, is not easily categorized: outrageous yet thoughtful ... characterized by a daring, restless energy that stretches known limits of architecture and soars."

Soared she has. In the past several years, she has won commissions on myriad continents: an opera house in China, a performing arts center in the United Arab Emirates, the Moscow Expo Center, a Guggenheim Museum in Taiwan, an automotive plant in Germany, to name just a few. In the United States, Hadid has designed an addition to Frank Lloyd Wright's Price Tower Arts Center in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, and an art museum for Michigan State University in East Lansing endowed by philanthropist Eli Broad. She was made an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a fellow of the American Institute of Architects.

Even in Britain, her adopted country, Hadid has triumphed over what her admirers once described as the forces of conservatism. (Prince Charles was one of her arch critics.) She was chosen to design the aquatics center for the 2012 London Olympics.

Although Hadid has not set foot in Iraq since 1980, she said her "secular modern upbringing" there has had a formative influence over her career. In an interview with Bloomberg News last fall, she said that the American invasion had scarred the country so much that she could no longer recognize it. Still, she harbors hopes that some...