The well-known architect Zaha Hadid—who designed major museums such as the Maxxi: Italian National Museum of 21st-century arts in Rome—has died, aged 65. A statement issued by her studio says that she suffered a sudden heart attack this morning (31 March) while being treated in hospital in Miami.
The architect Daniel Libeskind wrote on Twitter that “her spirit will live on in her work and studio”, while the Royal Academy of Arts in London tweeted about their academician: "We’re deeply saddened by the loss of Zaha Hadid RA, one of the world’s most important architects."
Julia Peyton-Jones and Hans Ulrich Obrist worked with Hadid for years, first as a trustee of the Serpentine Galleries since 1996, and then when she designed the Serpentine Sackler Gallery which opened in 2013. They wrote in a statement that she was "not only a great architect but also a great artist and she leaves an extraordinary body of work not only as a built form but also paintings and drawings where she often explored the ideas that would later be transformed into architecture. Drawing was at the very heart of her work."
Hadid is recognised for breaking into the male-dominated world of international architecture, drawing on the legacy of Constructivism to make complex, dramatic buildings. These include the Heydar Aliyev Centre in Baku (2013) and the Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati (2003). Last year, Hadid designed a museum dedicated to the art of climbing buried within the peak of Mount Kronplatz in the Italian Alps.
However, some of her radical designs divided opinion. Her plans for the Cardiff Bay Opera House were abandoned in the mid 1990s. In 2008, her practice won the international competition to design the Guggenheim Hermitage Museum in Vilnius, Lithuania, but the plan was never realised.
An exhibition of the late architect’s designs—featuring more than 300 models, drawings, and photographs—opened at the State Hermitage museum last year in St Petersburg, drawing 680,000 visitors during its three-month run.
Hadid was born in Baghdad in 1950 and studied mathematics at the American University of Beirut before training as an architect at the Architectural Association in London between 1972 and 1977. Her graduation thesis drew on the influence of the Russian avant-garde artist Kazimir Malevich. She founded her own studio in London in 1979, but her first major commission was the Vitra fire station in Weil am Rhein, Germany, in 1993.
She was the first woman to win both the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 2004 and the Royal Gold Medal from the Royal Institute of British Architects (Riba), awarded earlier this year. Her Maxxi commission also won the Riba Stirling prize in 2010.