salimma's Journal: How... British

This reminds me of those Yes (Prime) Minister episodes I have been watching for the past weekend, with the entire establishment playing rear-guard Humphrey-an style...

A woman architect, and from a minority culture/religion too... presumably she does not build the phallic-shaped monstrosities one requires to get a peerage in Britain.

From the Independent:

Spurned at home, British designer wins architecture's 'Nobel prize'

By James Burleigh

22 March 2004

A female architect who is based in Britain but has yet to win a commission in the UK has been awarded her profession's equivalent of the Nobel prize, it was announced yesterday.

Zaha Hadid, 53, is the first woman to win the coveted Pritzker Architecture Prize in its 25-year history. Now a British citizen, the Baghdad-born designer's relatively small collection of Modernist works has already vaulted her into the top league of a profession dominated by men. She is the third Briton to have been awarded the prize.

...

Ms Hadid has not had any of her projects completed in Britain and her career in her adopted country has been marked by several high-profile setbacks. Most notably, political in-fighting scuppered her radical design for the Cardiff Bay Opera House in Wales in 1995. In November last year she narrowly missed winning the chance to design a new classical-music headquarters for the
  BBC at its otherwise dreary White City complex.

In a recent interview Ms Hadid said that she had been stigmatised in Britain, where her firm won plenty of competitions, but rarely saw them into reality because of "dodgy" rules that allowed organisers to take a different course.

The citation from the Pritzker jury said Ms Hadid's path to worldwide recognition had been a "heroic struggle." Lord Rothschild, the chairman of the jury, referred to "the forces of conservatism" being responsible for her inability to complete a building in London.

...

Let me get this straight . . .

[GMontag]

Her work is too Liberal for the biggest clump of islands to europe?!

That is like being too impressionist for Manhattan, too flamboyant for San Francisco or too "loose" for Amsterdam!

Re:Let me get this straight . . .

[salimma]

There are stuffy stiff-upper-lips who have not heard of women's suffrage, let alone feminism or modern architecture, you know.

The funny thing is that there are a lot of dreadful buildings that went up in the '60s that they could have blocked, instead of this architect's works.

Even in bastions of British values like Oxford and Cambridge. Awful, leaky buildings that cost millions of pounds.