The British architect Zaha Hadid was 43 when she realized her first major project. Now, ten short years later, she has won the highest award an architect can gain, the Pritzker Prize. On 31 May, as the first woman and as one of the youngest prizewinners in its history, she will receive this coveted award, which is donated annually by the proprietors of the Hyatt Hotel empire. After studying in Beirut and at the Architectural Association in London, and after a brief appearance in Rem Koolhaas’s Office for Metropolitan Architecture, Hadid practised her profession from the wings, so to speak, as an international guest lecturer and an easily of-fended leading lady. Apart from her famous fire station in Weil am Rhein, a pavilion for the state horticultural show in the same town and a house in Berlin that was tamed to domesticity by local building regulations, few of her many projects have been realized.