Zaha Hadid was born in Baghdad in 1950 to a prominent Iraqi family, studied mathematics at the American University of Beirut, and moved to London in 1972 to train at the Architectural Association under Rem Koolhaas and Elia Zenghelis. She worked briefly at Koolhaas's Office for Metropolitan Architecture before opening her own practice in 1980, spending nearly two decades known chiefly through fractured, exploded drawings shown at MoMA's 1988 Deconstructivist Architecture exhibition while almost nothing of hers got built. The Vitra Fire Station of 1993 was her first completed building. Parametric software later let her practice realise at scale the continuously curved geometry she had drawn for years, at the MAXXI in Rome and the Heydar Aliyev Center in Baku. In 2004 she became the first woman to win the Pritzker Prize alone. She died suddenly in Miami in March 2016, mid-career.
