Zaha Hadid is an Iraqi-British architect. In 2004 she became the first woman recipient of the Pritzker Architecture Prize. From the time she was a student at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London, Zaha Hadid, Fellow of the American Institute of Architects, was famously influenced by the Russian Suprematists of St. Petersburg, mainly by Kazimir Malevich.
Early in her career, Hadid resolved to develop the ideas of a movement that was derailed after political resistance against them, grown in post-Revolutionary Russia. Malevich was never able to consummate his own theories by building real structures. But through her projects Hadid brought the implications of the Black Square, the Red Square, and all the other four-dimensional geometries floating in the white infinities of Malevich’s canvases into reality, in a way the master himself could not have anticipated. In project by project taking great evolutionary leaps, she transformed his “Suprematism” into designs of keen emotional intensity [1].
But Hadid’s work did not just extrapolated from canonical suprematism or other influences; her own artistic and architectural inventiveness took those seminal influences into highly original, purely Hadidian territory.In a reaction to the often crushing regularities of industrial Modernism and the leveling impact of normative standards it was Hadid who escaped Euclidean forms early in her career with impure, illegitimate geometries, and then with increasingly liquid shapes and spaces, some stretched like rubber. She works with surprising versatility at all scales in all building types, from her vast urban plan for Singapore to product design: shoes, rings, benches, and even a car.
Unlike the Russian Constructivists, often confused with Suprematists, Hadid is not concerned about the mechanics of architecture, about showing how buildings are fastened. Malevich was a mystic, and Hadid likewise wanted to create a sense of wonder.