Zaha Hadid is in my personal opinion, the epitome of the new-age architect. Her philosophical views on architecture is ahead of it's time. Her work reflects that of her radical, non-compromising over-the-top personality.

She grew up in 1950s liberal, secular, western-focused Iraq. (Which is much different from the Iraq that comes to mind today). Her father was politician, economist, industrialist co-founder of the Iraqi National Democratic and a leader of the Iraqi Progressive Democratic Parties. It's easy to see where she obtained her ambitious drive from. She went to convent school in Baghdad and Switzerland and obtained a degree in Mathematics at American University in Beirut. Afterward she enrolled in Architectural Association(AA) in London 1972 (place architectural imagination; home to the greats Rem Koolhaas, Daniel Libeskind, Will Alsop and Bernard Tschumi) but was especially drawn to work of Koolhaas.

AA rejected kitsch post-modernism; adopted “new modernism with a more sophisticated idea of history and human identity”. With post-modernism at it's peak in the sixties, Architectural Association went in the opposite direction in adopting a neo-modernism.

After graduating in 1977, Koolhaas offered her a job at his and  and Elia Zenghelis’s new firm, the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (which didn't last long). Koolhaas even described her as "a planet in her own orbit," I can't think of a better way to summarize Hadid's own way of thinking. She then started teaching at AA while developing her own neo-modernist style.

Her graduation project was a hotel on London's Hungerford Bridge called Malevich's Tectonik, named after the supremacist Kasimir Malevich who wrote:“we can only perceive space when we break free from the earth, when the point of support disappears.”

This is a concept painting for a fourteen-level hotel  on the Hungerford Bridge in London. It was inspired by Russian Suprematist movement.