Zaha Hadid’s

Flowers of Devotion

Her major works include the Aquatic Centre for the London 2012 Olympics, Michigan State University's Broad Art Museum in the USA, the Guangzhou Opera House in China, and the Al Wakrah Stadium in Doha, a venue for the 2022 FIFA World Cup. She designed the Heydar Aliyev Cultural Centre in Baku, Azerbaijan for which, in 2014, she won the Museum Design of the Year Award, making her the first woman to win the top prize in that competition. The centre has been assessed as, “the most complete realization yet of the Iraqi born architect's vision of sweeping curves and flowing space.» Other buildings relating to cultural activities which she designed in the Muslim world include the Abu Dhabi Performing Arts Centre and the King Abdullah II House of Culture and Art, Amman, Jordan.

She had an active and influential architectural teaching career, first at the Architectural Association, then, over the years, at Harvard Graduate School of Design, Cambridge University, the University of Chicago, the Hochschule für bildende Künste in Hamburg, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and Columbia University.

Like Zeynep Fadıllıoğlu, Zaha Hadid was a designer whose activities also extended beyond that of architecture to furniture and home wares, etc.

Zaha Hadid died unexpectedly in late 2016 during a routine medical procedure, leaving a number of major uncompleted projects, including a new building for the Central Bank of Iraq (her first project in her native country) and the Iraqi Parliament Building in Baghdad.

In 2015, she was honoured in Russia with an exhibition dedicate to her life’s work at the Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg. In 2011, she had also been honoured with an exhibition at France’s foremost window on Islamic cultural heritage, the Institut du Monde Arabe.

In her later career Zaha Hadid conceived detailed designs for a number of large metropolitan mosques which stretch the boundaries of customary thinking about mosque structures and spaces none of which were to be realized.

These included concepts for a Mosque and Museum of National Harmony in Pristina, Kossovo, and a Great Mosque for Strasbourg, France. She also offered her services gratis to Athens to design a city mosque: Athens at that time was the only European capital without a purpose built place of Muslim worship, the only such functioning mosques in Greece being in Thrace in the north east of the country.

Zaha Hadid’s last mosque design was commissioned by the Government of Kuwait for a contemporary mosque at the Avenues Mall in Kuwait City. Intended to serve a busy urban commercial complex, the project has not yet gone ahead following her abrupt demise. Nevertheless, it is a testimony to the creativity and spirituality of this acclaimed international Muslim figure at the pinnacle of her career.

GUY (GHAYDAR) PETHERBRIDGE

PROFESSOR, EXPERT ON CULTURAL HERITAGE AND HISTORY OF ISLAM, AUSTRALIA, RUSSIA