Zaha Hadid

Los Angeles, March 21 (Reuters): 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 described as the architecture world’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize, organisers said today. At 53, she is also one of the youngest Pritzker laureates.

Hadid’s built works include a fire station in Weil am 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 US 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 corner 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 high-profile 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 front-page news in Britain.

Hadid said she has been stigmatised 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” rules that allow organisers 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 honouring a living architect whose built works, among other things, produce “consistent and significant contributions to humanity.”