It’s probably the case that with only a few exceptions, architects are the last people we think of when the topic of artists comes up in conversation.  Of painters, musicians, actors, poets, and authors, chances are we can all name a few.  With architects however, the list usually stops with Frank Lloyd Wright, although a few people may have heard of Frank Gehry, Philip Johnson, or I. M. Pei.

Last week one of the more creative and distinctive architects of our age died.  Her name was Zaha Hadid, and that pronoun itself was enough to make her distinctive in a field traditionally dominated by men.  In fact much of her life story also set her apart.  She was born into a wealthy Baghdad family in 1950, and as a young girl was sent away to boarding schools in England and Switzerland.  She studied mathematics at the American University in Beirut and in 1972 returned to London to study architecture.  It was there in the early 1980s she opened her own firm.

In 2004, Hadid became the first woman to win architecture’s most prestigious honor, the Pritzker Prize.  She went on to win the Royal Institute of British Architects’ Stirling Prize in 2010 and 2011, and earlier this year received its Royal Gold Medal.  She was an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Fellow of the American Institute of Architecture.

Hadid was unquestionably an internationally prominent role model for women who wanted to be architects, although she bridled when being praised as a female architect.  “Long after the novelty of her gender fades from the public’s mind,” wrote one of her former students last week, “she will be remembered for the swooping, sumptuous monumentality of her buildings.”  The Dean of the Yale School of Architecture described her work as things “I never could have imagined, much less imagined getting built.”  She also designed benches, tables, chandeliers, and even wallpaper, all of which bear testimony to her artistic vision.

“There is no single Hadid style,” critic John Seabrook wrote in a profile for the New Yorker in 2009, “although one can detect a watermark in her buildings’ futuristic smoothness.”  Seabrook explained that for years, Hadid—who held the great Russian Modernist painters Kazimir Malevich and Wasily Kandinsky as inspirations—“submitted abstract drawings and paintings to convey her ideas, because, as she would explain with absolute conviction to dubious clients, abstraction was the best way to capture multiple perspectives in two dimensions.”  She thought of herself as an artist first, even though as an architect she often had clients to please.

Her extant work includes a fire station in Germany, train stations in Austria, and a luxury condominium tower currently under construction in Miami.  She designed the Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati, which I visited in 2011, clueless that it was hers.  How I wish I could go back and appreciate the building more, although I do remember thinking it was distinctive as I rode up the escalators.

Her most amazing works are the opera house in Guangzhou, China; the London Aquatics Center; and, my hands-down favorite, a cultural center in the Azerbaijan capital of Baku.  With its sweeping roofline and graceful curves it’s hard to believe that it’s actually a building.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen an architect whose work is more obviously artistic than Zaha Hadid.  Take some time to look at pictures of her buildings online—you will have never seen anything like them.  And you will never wonder again whether the work of a great architect should be considered art.