Zaha Hadid@People

Zaha Hadid, who in 2004 became the first woman to receive the Pritzker Architecture Prize, is known for the powerful, curving forms of her elongated structures. She was born in Iraq in 1950, a time when Modernism connoted glamor and progressive thinking in the Middle East, and was raised in one of Baghdad's first Bauhaus-inspired houses.

Ms. Hadid was first a mathematics student in Beirut but then moved to London to study architecture at the Architectural Association School, where she met Rem Koolhaas, Elia Zenghelis and Bernard Tschumi, architects who became leading exponents of experimental European architecture. Her influence in the field began early, with the publication of her designs for unbuilt projects, especially the Cardiff Bay Opera House (1994).

Her first building in the United States, the Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati, was an immediate critical and popular success. It led to major commissions, including the BMW Central Building in Leipzig, Germany; the Phaeno Science Center in Wolfsburg, Germany; Maxxi, the National Center for Contemporary Arts in Rome; and a high-speed train station in Naples.

Now a citizen of Britain, Ms. Hadid is active in Europe, Asia and the Mideast. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York presented her first major retrospective in the United States, "Zaha Hadid: Thirty Years in Architecture," in 2006.January 23, 2008

@Source: http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/h/zaha_hadid/index.html