Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid (1950–2016) left an indelible mark on the architectural landscape. Her striking structures grace the skylines of major metropolitan cities, while her product designs, including furniture, jewelry, lighting, and shoes, can be found in homes around the world. The boundary-pushing designer—arguably the most famous female architect of her time—received numerous prestigious awards over the course of her career, including the 2004 Pritzker Architecture Prize, the 2010 and 2011 Stirling Prize, the 2014 Design Museum Design of the Year Award for her Heydar Aliyev Cultural Center, and the 2015 RIBA Gold Medal. Here, Architectural Digest looks back at her amazing contributions to the field, from her futuristic buildings, such as Beijing’s Galaxy Soho, the London Aquatics Center, and the Guangzhou Opera House, to her dazzling superyachts.

she used calligraphic drawings as the main method for visualising her architectural ideas. For Hadid, painting was a design tool, and abstraction an investigative structure for imagining architecture and its relationship to the world we live in.

“Architecture is based on science as well as intuition, and if you want to be an architect you must have control of technology to be capable of developing your own ideas, and then demonstrate that the intuition is correct, to build your own dreams”. architecture is an art that relates science, intuition and creativity, you cannot create a quality project if you don’t know how to make a correct use of these domains, since both factors are equally important during the project development. Although architecture materializes through the construction process, it is only possible that the project is carried out correctly and with quality through the process of creativity and thought.