Strikingly, Ms. Hadid never allowed herself or her work to be pigeonholed by her background or her gender. Architecture was architecture: it had its own reasoning and trajectory. And she was one of a kind, a path breaker. In 2004, she became the first woman to win the Pritzker Prize, architecture’s Nobel; the first, on her own, to be awarded the RIBA Gold Medal, Britain’s top architectural award, in 2015.

Inevitably, she stirred nearly as much controversy as she won admiration, provoking protests from human rights advocates when her $250 million cultural center in Baku, Azerbaijan, forced the eviction of families from the site. A commission to design a stadium in Qatar — a sensuous plan that more than a few observers likened to female anatomy — became, in truth unfairly, a lightning rod for critics who decry the treatment of foreign laborers by the government there. She sued for defamation one critic who falsely reported that 1,000 workers had died building her stadium — before construction had even begun. She won a settlement and an apology.

After winning the competition to design a new stadium for the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo, Ms. Hadid’s firm was fired by Japanese authorities, over accusations about looming cost overruns, a decision Ms. Hadid loudly declared unjust and political.

Zaha Hadid was born in Baghdad on Oct. 31, 1950. Her father was an industrialist, educated in London, who headed a progressive party advocating for secularism and democracy in Iraq. Baghdad was a cosmopolitan hub of modern ideas, which clearly shaped her upbringing. She attended a Catholic school where students spoke French, and Muslims and Jews were welcome. After that, she studied mathematics at the American University in Beirut (she would later say her years in Lebanon were the happiest of her life).