Pritzker Prize-winning architect Hadid renowned for creativity

Zaha Hadid, the first woman to win the Pritzker Prize, architecture’s highest honour, and whose celebrated designs incorporated sweeping curves, open spaces and a complex sculptural fluidity, died Thursday at a Miami hospital. She was 65.

Her architecture f i rm announced her death, saying she had contracted bronchitis earlier this week and had a heart attack while being treated.

The Iraqi-born Hadid was once derided as a “paper architect” whose designs were visually impressive but seldom built. But after winning the Pritzker Prize in 2004, she became one of the busiest architects in the world.

Among other projects, she designed the aquatic centre for the 2012 Olympic Games in London, museums in Cincinnati, Glasgow and Rome, an auto plant in Germany and an opera house in China.

“Among architects emerging in the last few decades,” architect Richard Rogers told Britain’s Guardian newspaper, “no one had any more impact than she did.”

As one of the few women prominent in the masculine world of architecture, Hadid struggled for years to gain recognition. She adopted a formidable, even flamboyant personal style that matched her approach to her art.

Hadid was not a utilitarian designer of the square-box school, but rather believed that architecture should be an expressive art form in its own right.

“I don’t think that architecture is only about shelter, is only about a very simple enclosure,” she told Newsweek in 2011. “It should be able to excite you, to calm you, to make you think.”

Hadid courted controversy throughout her career, beginning when she was told that her early designs — often rendered as semi-abstract paintings — could not be built. With the help of computers, she proved that her flowing, irregularly shaped spaces followed sound engineering principles and would not collapse under their own weight.

In 2003, Hadid completed her first building in the United States, the Richard and Lois Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati. Set in a small space on a street corner, the museum is built as a set of interlocking concrete blocks.

Architecture enthusiasts took note, and Hadid won the Pritzker, often called the Nobel Prize of architecture, and commissions poured into her London office from around the world.

Her unfinished projects include a new Iraqi parliament building and the Iraqi central bank in Baghdad. Hadid was also commissioned to build two prominent athletic stadiums, one in Tokyo for the 2020 Summer Olympics and another in Qatar for the 2022 World Cup of soccer.