# The Curve *A Biography of Zaha Hadid* — Legendary Biographies No. 092 - **Subject:** Zaha Mohammad Hadid - **Written by:** Ailsa Rennie - **Shelf:** Art & Design / Architecture - **Published:** 2026 - **Extent:** 203 pages, 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink - **Paperback:** $19.99 — 6 × 9 in · 203 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · perfect-bound paperback - **EPUB:** $3.99 — EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books (ISBN 979-8-90623-092-8) - **Audiobook:** $5.99 — Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Imogen Vey (ISBN 979-8-90623-163-5) Buy it, or read the opening free: volumes/092-the-curve.html ## About this book She was born on October 31, 1950, in Baghdad, the daughter of a wealthy industrialist who would become the leader of the Iraqi Progressive Party. She read mathematics at the American University of Beirut and architecture at the Architectural Association in London, where she earned the AA Diploma Prize in 1977. She opened her own practice in London in 1980. For thirteen years she designed almost nothing she could build — the 1983 Hong Kong Peak design and the 1995 Cardiff Bay Opera House design were both eviscerated by their selection committees — and was widely dismissed as a paper architect. Her first major built project, the Vitra Fire Station in Weil am Rhein, opened in 1993. By her death in Miami on March 31, 2016, of a heart attack while being treated for bronchitis at Mount Sinai Medical Center, she had become the first woman to win the Pritzker Prize, designed 950 projects in fifty-five countries, and built the visual grammar of twenty-first-century architecture. Ailsa Rennie's biography opens earlier — in the secular Baghdad of the 1950s and the AUB Beirut of the 1960s — and follows the arc through the AA years and the Rem Koolhaas collaboration, the long paper-architect decade, the Vitra Fire Station, the 2004 Pritzker, the BMW Central Building and the Phaeno Science Centre, the 2012 Aquatic Centre for the London Olympics, the Heydar Aliyev Centre in Baku, the Beijing Daxing International Airport (with the ADP Ingénierie group), the 2014 Stirling Prize for the Stirling MAXXI museum in Rome, and the morning of March 31, 2016. What emerges is a portrait of the Baghdad-born Iraqi-British architect whose forty-year career remade what was structurally possible, and whose Pritzker the field of architecture had taken thirty-five years to bring itself to give to a woman. ## Contents 1. The Curve 2. Baghdad 3. The Mathematical Eye 4. The Architectural Association 5. Rem 6. The Peak 7. Paper Architect 8. Deconstructivism 9. Vitra 10. Cardiff 11. The Desert Years 12. Cincinnati 13. The Pritzker 14. The World Catches Up 15. The Aquatics Centre 16. The Labour Question 17. March Thirty-First 18. The Buildings Remain ## Questions **Who is The Curve about?** Zaha Mohammad Hadid. The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case The Curve — and the name goes on the line underneath. **Is this an authorised biography?** No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented. **Can I read some of it before buying?** Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 3,758 words of the book. **How long is it?** About 60,500 words, 18 chapters, 203 pages in the paperback. **What is the printed book like?** 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink, perfect-bound paperback, matte laminate. Every title in the series uses the same specification, so they line up on a shelf. ## The writer Ailsa Rennie writes biography out of Edinburgh, with a focus on women in twentieth-century science, art, and letters whose work was historically credited to the men in the rooms beside them. Her writing uncovers forgotten archival papers to reconstruct the lived realities of intellectual collaboration. Through works like Compound S, The Fossil Hunter, and The Birkbeck Years, she examines the institutional structures that obscured female achievement. She also explores these themes of lost legacy and ownership in The Paris Radium Institute and The Letter from Madras. She lives in the Edinburgh suburbs, where she spends her weekends restoring antique bookbindings and volunteering at a local community orchard.