Zaha Hadid received the Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Centre for the Middle East’s Lifetime Achievement award posthumously.
The Atlantic Council’s work on social, economic, and human development in the Middle East carries on Rafik Hariri’s legacy and his life’s aim of unlocking the Arab world’s people and economic potential.
Charles Walker, director of Zaha Hadid Architects, accepted the Lifetime Achievement award on behalf of Zaha Hadid at the ceremony in Washington DC, saying: “Dame Zaha Hadid was an extraordinary architect whose impact on the profession will be felt for generations to come… The first woman to win the Pritzker Prize – the highest accolade of our profession – the Pritzker Jury noted how she consistently defied convention to fundamentally expand the possibilities of architecture… Lauded as an iconoclast, the New York Times writer Joseph Giovannini explained, ‘Rarely has an architect so radically changed and inspired the field.”
Walker continued, “Teaching at Harvard, Yale, and the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, she saw in youth the promise of a better future… In her will, Zaha’s final act was to gift Zaha Hadid Architects into the ownership of its employees. Her unwavering optimism for the future and belief in the power of invention is embedded in the DNA of our practice and we continue as one of the world’s most innovative design studios; completing Zaha’s legacy projects and redefining architecture for the 21st Century with a repertoire of projects that capture imaginations, across the globe. Now 500 architects strong, we continue to pursue her legacy of experimentation and invention.”
