ARTISTIC LICENSE.(architect Zaha Hadid's work on the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, Ohio)

Zaha Hadid is famous for producing extraordinary drawings of visionary projects, such as a night club in the hills of Hong Kong that looks like a series of broken shards. She is a cultish figure who has built very little of note, save for a fire station in Germany--which was converted into a museum shortly after its completion--and a building designed for a ski jump in Innsbruck, Austria. Hadid was born into a cosmopolitan Iraqi family in Baghdad in 1950. Her father, Muhammad Hadid, was a businessman and a leader of the National Democratic Party, which advocated social democracy and parliamentary reform during the postwar years of the Hashemite monarchy. He had studied at ...