Dame Zaha Hadid, 62, the very first female winner of the Pritzker Architecture Prize and one of the most accomplished architects on earth, has now been announced as the “Woman of the Year 2012” by Glamour Magazine, a magazine centered around fashion, beauty, & celebrity news.
From Glamour magazine:
Part of the problem? She was a woman in a man’s job—Hadid still thinks that’s a reason she lost out on early commissions. But she kept her studio alive with teaching, interiors projects, and furniture design. In 1993 she got her break: She was commissioned to build a fire station in Germany. Then an art center in Cincinnati. And finally more and more buildings in capital cities all over the world, including this year’s aquatic center for the London Olympics, lauded for its epic, sweeping design and deemed by one critic to be the 2012 Games’ “most majestic space.”
What sets her structures apart is their grace. Her inspiration: “Rivers, dunes,” she says, “the fluid landscape of the Middle East.” Her friend and 2007 Woman of the Year Donna Karan, for whom she designed a perfume bottle, says, “Whatever the medium, Zaha imparts lyricism and sensuality.”
Hadid is working on 43 buildings with her 360-person studio. “What haven’t I done yet?” Hadid asks. “A skyscraper in New York and,” she adds, not kidding at all, “a house of my own!”
Zaha Hadid is a Woman of the Year because… “She’s an extraordinary force of nature that came out of the blue and whacked us all on the back of the head and said, ‘Wake up, kids, there’s more stuff to do.’ ” —architect Frank Gehry
For more details check out Glamour Magazine