This non fiction book spread over 56 pages on an AR 4.0 level is the biography of the famed Iraqi architect’s inspiration, triumph over obstacles and accomplishments. It doesn’t go in to great detail of her life, but gives enough information for children to become familiar with her and be inspired by all that she accomplished not only as an Arab, Muslim woman, but as an architect and trail blazer of design and structure. The pages are beautifully illustrated and the simple text flows and dances around the pages like her buildings in real life.
Born in Iraq where rivers flow, wind swoops across sand dunes, and cities existed thousands of years ago, Zaha finds designs and shapes throughout her home and the city of Baghdad. She has ideas about arrangements of furniture and designs of clothing, she loves that dunes and rivers and marshes don’t have corners.
She is a Muslim that attends Catholic school and loves math. She goes to London for college to study to be an architect. She is relentless in her passion and fills notebooks with plans, paintings with what she sees in her mind and graduates with honors.
She opens her own office and with a few friends, she designs buildings that swoosh and zoom and flow and fly. The world is not a rectangle, but unfortunately no one wants to build her designs. She keeps entering competitions, and winning, but they refuse to build her buildings.
She designs buildings that come from her memory of grasses swaying, and wind blowing over dunes, and shells being cradled. She designs an opera house like a pebble in the water, with the singer the pearl. A ski jump that reaches the sky like a mountain.
One by one, Zaha’s designs become buildings all over the world. She has over 400 employees and designs buildings, shoes, doll houses, furniture, she does what she likes and urges others to do so as well. Zaha passed away in 2016, but her visions are still carried out.
Islamic School Librarian 