The Curve

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.