Steve Double

Zaha Hadid

Iraqi-born Zaha Hadid, 59, was the first woman to win the prestigious Pritzker Architecture Prize. She moved to London in 1972, and she continues to work there as head of the eponymous architecture firm she founded in 1980. Having made a name as an esoteric, wildly experimental designer and thinker, she wowed peers, critics, and would-be clients with her first project to be built, a sharply angular concrete fire station in Germany in 1993. Her first American building was the Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati, built in 2003. She's currently working on the MAXXI, the National Museum of XXI Century Arts in Rome.

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