I am an architect, artist and designer. I use painting as a design tool and abstraction as a method to reopen the untested experiments of Modernism and find new fields of building.
Teaching was the base of my early reputation and stayed with me: the Sullivan Chair in Chicago, visiting chairs at Harvard and Yale, and my own masterclass in Vienna from 2000.
In Baku (2007–2013) I designed a cultural and conference centre — three auditoriums, a library and museum, 74 metres high — whose fluid form rises from the folds of the landscape. It won Design of the Year in 2014.
For the 2012 Olympics I designed the London Aquatics Centre, inspired by "the fluid geometry of water in movement": three pools and 17,500 seats under a parabolic roof resting on just three supports.
In 2004 I won the Pritzker, the most prestigious award in architecture, as its first woman recipient — with only four completed buildings to my name.
At the Phaeno Science Center and BMW's Leipzig building I raised the volume on leaning concrete pylons and filled the ground beneath with life — a design method I repeated across my work.
In Innsbruck I replaced a 1926 Olympic ski jump with a 48-metre "organic hybrid" of bridge and tower, with a 150-seat panoramic cafe — and had one year to complete it before the next competition.
Between 1998 and 2010 I designed and built MAXXI, Rome's National Museum of Arts of the 21st Century, as a building where everything seems to move and flow. It won the Stirling Prize in 2010.
I won the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati against Rem Koolhaas and other leading architects, and became the first woman to design an art museum in the United States. I used form to create interior drama in an 8,500 m² building.
For Vitra's factory in Weil am Rhein I designed a small fire station in raw concrete and glass — sharp diagonal forms colliding in the centre. It became my first built work and the start of my architectural career.
Even as technology entered design, I kept hand-drawing my buildings and making models, so my designs were never limited to what the computer could do. My paintings exploded site and programme to find the form.
I studied mathematics at the American University of Beirut before moving to London in 1972 to study at the Architectural Association, where I learned to think in diagonals.
