Book "Zaha Hadid" - Taschen

Zaha Hadid was a revolutionary architect who, despite considerable critical acclaim, was able to build almost nothing for years. Some even claimed that her bold, futuristic projects were impossible to realise.

Yet in the final years of her life, Hadid's daring visions became reality, marking cities and various structures with a unique and ground-breaking architectural language, as demonstrated by the Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati, hailed by the New York Times as "the most important American building to be completed since the end of the cold war", the MAXXI museum of contemporary art in Rome, the Guangzhou Opera House in China and the London Aquatics Centre for the 2012 Olympic Games.

Before her sudden death in 2016, Hadid belonged to the elite of world architecture. She was recognised as the first woman to be awarded both the Pritzker Architecture Prize and the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) Gold Medal, but above all she was acclaimed as a creator of new forms and the first great architect of the 2000s.

From her first right-angled buildings to her later creations with their more fluid lines, in which floors, ceilings, walls and furniture all play a part in the overall form, this definitive introduction presents the key examples of Hadid's pioneering method. An artist as much as an architect, she was determined to challenge outdated conventions and created her own universe for the twenty-first century.