Zaha Hadid. Complete Works 1979–Today

The Library Essay

Unbuildable Was a Temporary Verdict

Zaha Hadid won the competition for Hong Kong's Peak Leisure Club in 1983 with drawings like exploding constructivist paintings, and then spent a decade celebrated as a paper architect whose work could not be built. The Vitra Fire Station of 1993 answered that, and the answers accelerated, the MAXXI in Rome, the London Aquatics Centre, the Heydar Aliyev Centre in Baku, buildings whose curves required engineering that had to be invented behind them.

Born in Baghdad in 1950 and trained in London, she became in 2004 the first woman awarded the Pritzker Prize, and died suddenly in 2016 with her practice at full flood. Philip Jodidio's Taschen volume, updated in 2020, surveys the complete work, built and unbuilt, the early paintings included, since that is where the buildings came from.