Zaha Hadid, Groundbreaking Architect, Dies at 65 Zaha Hadid, the Iraqi-British architect whose curving, elongated structures left a mark on skylines around the world, and who was the first woman to win the Pritzker Prize, her profession's highest honor, died in Miami on Thursday. She was 65. Ms. Hadid "contracted bronchitis earlier this week and suffered a sudden heart attack while being treated in hospital," her office, Zaha Hadid Architects in London, said in a statement. Renowned for her theoretical work, Ms. Hadid's designs were so complex that for the first few decades of her practice, many of her more ambitious projects were never completed, even as she gained a dedicated following among colleagues. Her completed projects include the Heydar Aliyev Centre in Baku, Azerbaijan (2013); Guangzhou Opera House in China (2010); the London Aquatics Centre, built for the 2012 Olympic Games; MAXXI: Italian National Museum of 21st Century Arts in Rome (2009); the Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati (2003); and the Vitra Fire Station in Weil Am Rhein, Germany (1993). Her design for the main facility for the 2020 Olympic Games, which was projected to be the most expensive ever of its kind, was scrapped last summer in a dispute over spiraling costs for the Tokyo games. It was originally expected to cost $2.5 billion, more than twice the $1.1 billion originally allocated for the stadium. Ms. Hadid, the winner of the 2004 Pritzker Architecture Prize, also designed an apartment block that will soon border the High Line, the elevated park in West Chelsea. The building, which lies on 520 West 28th Street and which was to be Ms. Hadid's first residential building in New York City, is to be completed by the end of this year or early next year. Clients, journalists, fellow professionals are mesmerized by her dynamic forms and strategies for achieving a truly distinctive approach to architecture and its settings," the Pritzker jury wrote in 2004, when she was awarded the prize. "Each new project is more audacious than the last and the sources of her originality seem endless." Born in Baghdad in 1950, Ms. Hadid studied mathematics at the American University of Beirut before s

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