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It took 25 years before the most prized of all architecture awards, the Pritzker Prize, was finally given to a woman.

That was 2004 and the woman was Zaha Hadid. Because the Iraqi-born, British-raised architect is considered a visionary in her field.
When she started out there were hardly any building developers willing to take a risk with her adventurous forms and deconstructed styles.
In 1993 she finally found a firm that would trust her and she was able to design a fire station. And then in 1998 the 33-year-old Hadid made major waves with her designs for a park, The Peak Leisure Club, in Hong Kong.
Those first few successes proved a springboard for bigger and even more noticeable projects: the Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Arts in Cincinnati, the central building for BMW in Leipzig and the Guggenheim-Museum in Taiwan as well as a science museum in Wolfsburg.