 We started off as an architect 30 years ago, more than 30 years ago, and it was built from that point. We started off with five people, maybe up to 25 to more recently, we have 400 people. Well, I mean, obviously I'm the instigator, the origin of many of the ideas, but with the focus, of course, is on innovation. It has always been about innovation, about new technology, about materials, but mostly about ideas, and we focused a lot in the last 30 years to develop an idea. I think that all the odds were against me. In the sense that it was very difficult for women to make an architecture. So it's not just being a woman or a foreigner, it was also the work itself, but people could not imagine it would ever be happening. So I think that to achieve maybe a fragment of what we would try to achieve was quite a feat, you know, was quite something. So I'm very proud that we managed to do that. What drives me, I know from my experience that if I had not pushed, I would not discover many things I discovered, and I still think there's more to be discovered. Well, of course, I never thought of myself as a rumble. At the beginning I always thought of myself as, I did not want to be, let's say, a woman architect. But I think later, I didn't change my mind. So it was very critical that I acknowledged the fact that, you know, you can influence other people. So I think it's important to inspire people in maybe a very modest way. To be nominated as a Biblical Businesswoman Award is a very nice thing. I mean, it's something which I don't expect to be nominated for. So I think it's a very humbling, pleasant experience. For the last 30 years, Zaha Hadid has gone from paper architect to global megastar. Her extraordinary architecture doesn't just stand, it melts, it slides, it wishes, it juts, it moves. Her buildings make us feel like we're in another place, another world, a Zaha-shaped world. Zaha Hadid has won all the top architecture awards. The Pritzker Prize for architecture and the Sterling Prize twice. I was a woman, I did strange stuff, I think they're all together intertwined. There definitely has been, and I still remain, it's much better now. There's a definite stigma, too, about the woman thing. Born in Iraq in 1950, Zaha Hadid is now a Dame of the British Empire. This year, she's even been named Businesswoman of the Year by Verve Klikola. Is a great architect who happens to be a woman Zaha Hadid? He's an accountant. He used to always tell the tax people that I was a ditzy princess from the Arab world. Not knowing that I came from a family who did not believe in the monarchy, but anyway. Architecture is no longer a man's world. This idea that women can't think food dimensionally is ridiculous. And I cannot say I've done it alone. I have great people, I have a great partner, Patrick Schumacher. I have great associates with me in the office who are a mixture of men and women. And they've all really contributed to this work. It's an almost improbable success story. It took years for her career to take off. The practice started life in just one room with four people and now employs almost 400. It's a global brand with buildings all over the world. In 1983, when she was 33, Zaha won her first prestigious international competition. It was to design a clubhouse to be located on the mountainside above Hong Kong. Her design was radical, but potentially it was building. Despite the brilliance and ambition of the project, Zaha's client lost the site and it was never built. Did you expect it to happen or what did you feel when it didn't and how did you feel? Well, I was very sad because it was like in our grasp, you know, and you know it could happen. But it didn't and yet the peak did put Zaha on the map. Her work was attracting the attention of young architects from all over Europe. Patrick Schumacher was one of them. You've got to have an ego. How is Zaha's ego? It was ten years after winning the peak that Zaha, now working happily with Patrick, completed her first major-built project, the Vitra Fire Station in Germany. Did it feel like to be in an office where you know you've got this powerful presence and creativity here and yet you don't win anything? There was always the optimism and hope that the next one will be it. The thing that kept me going is that I really enjoyed the work. It was very tough. After the times I enjoyed the most were the toughest moments. We were left to develop these ideas through competitions. I always thought at the end we'll win. I had no money and these people just didn't let go. You know Patrick was teaching in Germany but he wouldn't charge me for working in London because he knew I had no money. I couldn't pay him. I think in the 90s honestly none of us lived. I mean for ten years we were maybe ten people but we did work for equivalent to a hundred people. That increased our repertoire so when we did get work eventually, it wasn't so difficult because we had tested every option. It was only because we worked on every competition. We killed ourselves until we won Cincinnati. In one year we won Rohn, Wolfsburg, the ski jump, one hundred dollars. The science centre in Wolfsburg marked a step change in her practice. It was a conceptual leap away from the jagged towards the elephantine, the snakey, the snail. Made easier by what became known as parametricism, of which Zaha and Patrick were pioneers. Parametric design is fundamentally where you allow the computer, you feed it for various ideas and then you allow it to invent form that you probably couldn't do in your mind. It's of such complexity that your brain couldn't think of it and certainly your hand couldn't sketch it. People always misunderstand this whole thing about computing. They think, well, they don't know what they're doing and they're just going to press a button and the computer does it. It's of course totally idiotic. So the shapes are made possible by parametricism and computers but there's more to it. Zaha's story is absolutely fabulous. She is the greatest woman architect, not in the world now and probably ever lived. And she's right here, you know, in London. You can touch her, well, almost. She does demand attention and she gets it. She goes to the States and she has dinner with Obama. She is a superstar. Zaha is, if you know her and if you understand her, she's a very inspiring person but you have to have a patience. You have to give her room. If you try to constrain her, then she will explode. Zaha was a genius. She was doing work that nobody else conceived of, never mind, figured out how to build. Zaha was a pioneer and she was a star with a firmament of ideas and of poetry and once a star goes out, there is really no one to replace it. She was unique. There are very few people in the world who are known by one name and, you know, anywhere in the world you can talk about Zaha. Who knows what extraordinary creative things might have come out of that imagination if it had another one or two decades to keep producing things. What she managed to do, which is so amazing, is to actually take this entire universe that seemed impossible and unbuildable and completely sort of changing our understanding of what's fantasy and what's reality. When you're an artist or an architect, you need immense courage, you know, and Zaha had this immense courage and radiating immense courage and I think that was infectious to many, many young people. How do you sum Zaha up? A great architect and a great person, a very special person. The very essence of Zaha was a real romantic, very sensitive, but a warrior too.