Zaha Hadid was known for the inventive designs of her buildings: Their gentle, sinuous shapes earned her the nickname "queen of the curve," which made it into her Guardian obituary on March 31, 2016.
The major works she's left behind include the aquatic centre for the 2012 London Olympics, Michigan State's Broad Art Museum, and the Guangzhou Opera House in China. She was also known for glass skyscrapers; she created Miami's One Thousand Museum, her first and only residential tower in the West, plus her own futuristic Miami condo just went on sale for £8 million.
More than a year after her death of a heart attack, Google is honouring the Baghdad-born architect with a 360-degree virtual-reality retrospective of her work. That's also why today, on Google's homepage, you'll see a Google Doodle depicting Hadid.
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Hadid is also being remembered for standing out as a trailblazer in the field of architecture, which still often shuts out women. She is the only woman to have won the prestigious Pritzker Architecture Prize, the industry's top award. And, predictably, there was the inevitable attitude policing.
"They always say I’m a diva — but they don’t call the guys a diva. It’s just because I’m a woman," Hadid told Newsweek in an interview back in 2011. "I think you’re displaced — they don’t expect you to do things like a guy does. So they give you a certain freedom, but whether they accept what you do is another story... They couldn’t pigeonhole me: I was crazy; the work was crazy; I was Iraqi; I’m a woman."
The annual 2017 Women in Architecture survey by the British Architects’ Journal showed a worrisome widening gender pay gap in the field, as well as female architects facing discrimination for being mothers and sexual harassment on the job, according to Newsweek.
Hadid's life reminds us that while there's still a long way to go, the sky's the limit.
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