📍Baghdad, Iraq
1950 – 1968“I was born in Baghdad in 1950, into a city that felt modern and hopeful. My parents were from Mosul families and were liberal, outward-looking people; my father, Muhammad Hadid, was an industrialist and politician, and our home was full of talk about ideas, politics and the future of Iraq. At school my classmates were Muslim, Christian and Jewish, and nobody thought that remarkable. Baghdad in those years was building itself anew, and I absorbed the idea that architecture could be part of a country's optimism. The journey that never left me was one my father organised. He took us to see the ancient Sumerian cities, and then we travelled by boat, and finally in a smaller boat made of reeds, into the villages of the southern marshes. Sand, water, reeds, birds, buildings and people all seemed to flow together there, with no hard line between landscape and settlement. Years later people described my buildings as fluid, and asked where those sweeping forms came from. Part of the answer is that afternoon on the water. I went on to boarding schools in Switzerland and England, studied mathematics at the American University of Beirut, and then went to the Architectural Association in London. I made my life in Britain, and the Iraq of my childhood changed beyond recognition. But the confidence of that household, where a girl was expected to have opinions and to use them, came with me. So did the belief, first learned in the marshes, that a building could move like a landscape.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today