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The World Is Not a Rectangle: A Portrait of Architect Zaha Hadid

The late Iraqi architect Zaha Hadid is the subject of a picture book that follows her from a childhood full of creativity and imagination and ideas and observations about the natural world to a young woman who loves math and wants to build cities and studies to be an architect. When she opens her own company, “Zaha’s designs don’t look like other designs. Her buildings swoosh and zoom and flow and fly. ‘The world is not a rectangle.’” But no one wants to build what she designs, until suddenly they do: building after building inspired by what she has noticed all her life, shapes and patterns and movement found in the natural world. A spare, lyrical tribute to the architect’s work and her tireless creativity weaves in quotes from Hadid and concludes by identifying some of her best-known buildings, referenced in the main narrative and shown again in thumbnails for visual reference. The stylized illustrations in Winters’s trademark, clean, warm style wonderfully convey moments of Hadid’s life and the direct inspiration of nature in her work. ©2017 Cooperative Children's Book Center

Illustrated by Jeanette Winter

CCBC Age Recommendation: Ages 5-9
Age Range: PreK-Early Elementary (Ages 4-7) Grades 3-5 (Ages 8-10)
Format: Picture book
Subjects: Architecture and Architects Biography Girls and Women Math and Mathematicians
Diversity subjects: Arab Asian Middle East Muslim

Publisher: Beach Lane
Publish Year: 2017
Pages: 56
ISBN: 9781481446693

CCBC Location: Non-Fiction, 720 Winter