Zaha Hadid Wins Pritzker Architecture PrizeFor the first time in its 25-year history, the
Zaha Hadid Wins Pritzker Architecture Prize
For the first time in its 25-year history, the coveted Pritzker Architecture Prize has been won by a woman, a Baghdad-born designer whose relatively small collection of Modernist works has vaulted her into the top league of a profession dominated by men.
Zaha Hadid, who is based in London, becomes only the third Briton to win what is sometimes de-scribed as the architecture world's equivalent of the Nobel Prize, organizers said on Sunday. At 53, she is also one of the youngest Pritzker laureates.
Hadid's built works include a fire station in Weilam Rhein, Germany, a car park in Strasbourg, France and a ski jump in Innsbruck, Austria. While seemingly quotidian in nature, these works showcase her bold use of space and geometry to mirror the complexity of urban living.
Her sole completed U.S. project, the Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati, opened last year. Hailed as an "urban oasis" by The New York Times, the eight-story comer structure looks like a collection of interlocking boxes perched delicately above the glass-enclosed downtown entrance.
Somewhat controversially, Hadid does not have any completed projects in the capital city of her adopted country. Indeed, her career has been marked by several highprofile setbacks. Most notably, political infighting scuppered her radical design for the Cardiff Bay Opera House in Wales in 1995, an episode that turned her into frontpage news in Britain.
In an interview with Reuters, Hadid said she has been stigmatized in Britain, where her firm wins plenty of competitions, such as the Cardiff Bay project, but rarely sees them turned into reality because of "dodgy" roles that allow the organizers to take a different course.
The citation from the Pritzker jury said Hadid's path to worldwide recognition has been a "heroic struggle." In an additional comment, Jury chairman Lord Rothschild referred to "the forces of conservatism'' for her inability to complete a building in London.
The Pritzker Prize was established in 1979 by the Pritzker family, the Chicago-based clan that owns the Hyatt hotel chain, as a means of honoring a living architect whose built works, among other things, produce "consistent and significant contributions to humanity."
The inaugural winner was Philip Johnson, the first of seven American honorees. The other British winners were James Stirling in 1981 and Lord Foster in 1999. Last year's winner was Jan Utzon, the Danish designer of the Sydney Opera House.
The prize, consisting of a bronze medallion and a ＄ 100,000 check is handed out at a different location each year. The ceremony for Hadid will take place at the State Hermitage Museum in St. Peters burg, Russia on May 31.
While the British establishment may be slow to embrace Hadid's radical stylings, she has plenty of fans in other parts of the world. In the United States, she is working on the Price Tower Arts Center, to be built in the shadow of Frank Lloyd Wright's 19story building in Bartlesville, Okla. Hadid is also one of the five finalists—and the sole Briton—selected to design the proposed 2012 Olympic Village in New York City.
In Europe, current projects include the main building for a new BMW plant in the German city of Leipzig, and the MAXXI contemporary arts center in Rome. Asian developments include a Guggenheim museum in Taiwan and an opera house in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou.
One part of the world where she has yet to leave her mark is Baghdad, which boasted examples of several early Modernist projects when she was growing up.
"I think it would be nice to do something there eventually, only because it's actually a rather nice city," Hadid said, noting that things may have changed a little in the 24 years since she was last ther
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