Zaha Hadid Wins Award (FYI)

[Young Offender]

Zaha Hadid First Woman to Claim Architecture's Prestigious Pritzker Prize
WEST HOLLYWOOD, Calif. (AP) 3.22.04, 8:00a -- Zaha Hadid, who struggled for years just to get her audacious and unconventional designs built, has been awarded architecture's most prestigious honor.

On Sunday the Iraqi-born architect became the first woman to receive the Pritzker Prize.

"The 2004 laureate is probably one of the youngest laureates and has one of the clearest architectural trajectories we've seen in many years. Each project unfolds with new excitement and innovation," said California architect and juror Frank Gehry, himself a 1989 Pritzker winner.

Jurors singled out the 53-year-old Hadid's designs for an Austrian ski jump, a German fire station and an Ohio art museum -- part of an international flurry of construction that only recently got under way.

Hadid, now a British citizen, exploded on the world architecture scene two decades ago when she won a competition to design a cliff-top resort above Hong Kong. Although the project was never built, it thrust her into the public eye, where she has remained ever since.

For years, though, she was most famous for being the architect whose buildings -- universally lauded as distinctive and dynamic -- remained unbuilt.

"It became like a cause celebre, because it perpetuated this wondering 'why not,' 'it's not possible,' 'it's not buildable,"' she said during a recent interview in the garden of a West Hollywood hotel.

Hadid said the "very extreme" drawings she created for one competition after another were invariably met with tremendous public pressure.

"They did not believe it was possible," Hadid said of her inventive designs. "There was not any work like that being done."

She cites the "Bilbao effect," following the 1997 opening of the titanium-clad Guggenheim Museum that Gehry designed for the city in Spain, as sparking greater public interest in her equally iconic work.

A year later, Hadid said she won four competitions, followed by another four the following year. Among them were two museums: the Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati and the National Center for Contemporary Arts in Rome.

"Without ever building, Zaha Hadid would have radically expanded architecture's repertoire of spatial articulation. Now that the implementation in complex buildings is happening, the power of her innovation is fully revealed," said juror Rolf Fehlbaum.

Now, her 60-person London firm, Zaha Hadid Architects, is in the midst of a flood of commissions, including a BMW factory in Germany, arts center in Oklahoma and train station in Italy.

Hadid will be awarded a $100,000 grant and a bronze medallion on May 31, during a ceremony at the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia.

Past winners of the Pritzker Prize, sponsored by the Chicago family that developed the Hyatt Hotel chain, include I.M. Pei, Renzo Piano and Rem Koolhaas, with whom Hadid once worked.

http://www.pritzkerprize.com/ http://www.zaha-hadid.com/

[Scandal]

What? No mention of her work with the Pet Shop Boys!

[Shopper]

I thought PSB had a curse...who ever worked with them went down oblivion lane

So zaha and kylie escaped

[shamelessbehave]

I miss PSB being mentioned there, Zaha made a great stage design for Nightlife tour.