Mohammed Hadid

This is the Baghdad that Zaha Hadid is born into, and her family sits close to its very center.

Her father is Mohammed Hadid, and to understand the house Zaha grows up in, you must first understand him.

He is not a man who inherited his standing passively.

He built it through conviction as much as commerce.

Educated at the London School of Economics in the 1930s, immersed there in the political and economic debates of a Europe still finding its footing after one war and edging, blind and stumbling, toward another, Mohammed Hadid returns to Iraq with ideas that are, for the region and the era, strikingly progressive.

He is an industrialist, yes.

He will go on to build one of the country's most successful manufacturing enterprises, cement and other materials, the literal stuff that nations are constructed from.

Notice how the reed arches curve." But a child who is paying attention, and everyone who knew Zaha as a child agrees that she was, ferociously, always paying attention, absorbs these encounters into the deep structure of how she understands built form long before she has a name for the profession that will eventually claim her.