She was "a planet in her own orbit" - Dame Zaha Hadid
To celebrate 100 years since British women were given the right to vote, The Telegraph - alongside the Mayor of London's #BehindEveryGreatCityCampaign - is running a weekly series.
'Hidden Credits' will look back and celebrate individual women who have smashed glass ceilings, helped change society for the better and given the UK's capital something to boast about.
Once described as 'the Queen of the curve', Dame Zaha Hadid was an Iraqi-British architect whose pioneering, highly acclaimed vision was said to have redefined architecture in the 21st century.
Born in Baghdad in October 1950, Zaha moved to London in 1972 where she attended the Architectural Association School.
Zaha's talent was evident very early on and at her graduation her professor, Reem Koolhaas, described her as "a planet in her own orbit".
She went on to teach at the AA School until 1987, leaving several years after establishing Zaha Hadid Architects in 1979. It was here in 2004 that she became the first woman to be awarded the Pritzker Architecture Prize, often considered the Nobel Prize for architecture.
Her award-winning streak didn't stop there.
In 2010 and 2011 she won the UK's most the prestigious architectural award, the Stirling Prize and the following year, in 2012, the Queen made Zaha a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire.
Her major designs include the aquatics centre for the London 2012 Olympics and the Guangzhou Opera House in China. After passing away in 2016, some of her designs were presented posthumously, including the statuette for the 2017 Brit Awards as well as the Al Wakrah stadium in Qatar where the 2022 Fifa World Cup will be held.
Another professor of Zaha's, Elia Zenghelis, noted how uninterested she was in details.
"The way she drew a staircase you would smash your head against the ceiling," he said. "The space was reducing and reducing, and you would end up in the upper corner of the ceiling. She couldn't care about tiny details. Her mind was on the broader pictures - when it came to the joinery she knew we could fix that all later. She was right."
After her unexpected death in 2016 from a heart attack, Deyan Sudjic wrote in the Guardian that Hadid was "an architect who first imagined, then proved, that space could work in radical new ways.
"Throughout her career she was a dedicated teacher, enthused by the energy of the young. She was not keen to be characterised as a woman architect, or an Arab architect. She was simply an architect."
