Zaha Hadid Architects

By 1980, the wanting has become impossible to contain inside someone else's office.

She leaves OMA and opens Zaha Hadid Architects in London, working initially from the top floor of a house in Kensington that belongs to a friend, and later from a series of modest studio spaces that never quite match the scale of what she is imagining inside them.

There is no grand unveiling of this new firm, no launch party, no press release.

There is a drafting table, a handful of collaborators willing to work for very little money on the promise of something extraordinary, and Hadid herself pacing the room in the evenings with a cigarette between her fingers, staring at a painting pinned to the wall as though it might, if she looked at it long enough, tell her how to finish it.

What she has instead is conviction and a portfolio of paintings so unlike anything else likely to arrive on the judge's table that dismissing them outright would require the jury to actively look away from the one entry in the pile that refuses to resemble every other entry in the pile.

When the results are announced in 1983, the news reaches the London studio not as a formal letter delivered with ceremony, but as these things so often happen, as a telephone call that interrupts an otherwise unremarkable afternoon.

Zaha Hadid Architects has won, not merely placed, not merely commended, won outright the first prize in an international competition for one of the most prestigious sites in one of the most expensive real estate markets on Earth, awarded to a five-year-old practice that has, up to that point, built essentially nothing.

The moment the news lands, something in the studio changes, and it changes quickly.