Doors Open for Architect
After Winning Pritzker

When Iraqi-born British architect Zaha Hadid became the first woman to win the Pritzker Architecture Prize a year ago this week, many noted how few of her experimental designs actually had been built.

The audacious architect's most significant completed projects were a ski jump in Austria, a fire station for a design-conscious furniture factory in Germany and an art museum in Cincinnati. Even the Pritzker jury chairman, Jacob Rothschild, lamented that not one building in Ms. Hadid's hometown, London, bore her name.

What a difference a year -- and a prestigious prize -- makes.

Since winning Pritzker's bronze medallion, Ms. Hadid has won commissions for the $132 million Marseilles headquarters of CMA CGM, the largest cargo shipper in France; a 40-story office tower in Milan; and a $95 million maritime museum in Scotland, among others.

For an outlier like Ms. Hadid, whose academic approach to architecture, replete with renderings that look like 25th-century urban living, getting clients to see her designs as realistic always has been tough. The prize "does make a big difference in the way people treat you. They think your office can handle the work."

Before winning, she was able to land big jobs, including a factory office building for BMW AG in Leipzig, Germany, and a train station in Naples, Italy. But the prize has elevated her standing among major users of real estate.

"We were always seen as a radical office doing strange things. The prize doesn't normalize us, but it makes you accessible to commercial projects," says the architect, 54 years old, known for a powerful, yet fluid geometry in her buildings. Winning the prize "just puts you out there in a different light."

CMA CGM Chairman Jacques R. Saade says the Marseilles government "requested that we pick big names," since the company's new headquarters will hold such a prominent physical position at the entrance to the port city. The private shipping firm, the fifth-largest in the world, invited three "world class" architects to submit ideas, Ms. Hadid among them. Mr. Saade wouldn't name the other two but said the Pritzker helped put Ms. Hadid in that league.

Ms. Hadid says developers from Taiwan, China and the Middle East have asked her to design office towers and residential buildings, the types of lucrative jobs that rarely end up in the hands of nonconformist architects. Nothing has broken ground yet, so she is reluctant to name names. But it is a clear shift in the kind of people willing to hire her.

To be sure, joining the ranks of I.M. Pei and Frank Gehry as a Pritzker laureate hasn't given Ms. Hadid a free pass. She lost competitions for three projects in New York and one in Connecticut last year. "I haven't received any [new] projects in America. It's a bit surprising, especially after doing the Cincinnati [Contemporary Art Center] and winning the Pritzker," she says.

The Pritzker family, owners of the Hyatt Hotel chain, established the architecture prize in 1979 in part because the discipline isn't recognized by the Nobel Prize. This year's award, announced Monday, went to Thom Mayne, the first American architect to win in 14 years.

As for buildings in Ms. Hadid's hometown, now she has two. There is a $133 million Olympic-size swimming center that will be built even if London fails to get the 2012 Summer Games. She also is designing the London Architecture Foundation's headquarters.

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