ROME - An Italian art museum yesterday won Britain's top architecture prize.
Rome's bold new contemporary art museum, Maxxi, designed by London-based architect Zaha Hadid, won this year's Riba Stirling Prize.
Ms Hadid, who designed the Aquatics Centre for the London 2012 Olympic Games, had been odds-on favourite for the prize for the best new European building "built or designed in Britain".
Commenting on Maxxi, the judges said: "The museum, for all its structural pyrotechnics, is rationally organised as five main suites. The building is bravely day-lit with a sinuous roof of controllable skylights, louvres and beams which orientate and excite the visitor and create uplifting spaces.
"This is a mature piece of architecture, the distillation of years of experimentation, only a fraction of which ever got built. It is the quintessence of Zaha's constant attempt to create a landscape as a series of cavernous spaces drawn with a free, roving line.
"The resulting piece, rather than prescribing routes, gives the visitor a sense of exploration. It is perhaps her best work to date."
Also in the running for the £20,000 (€22,800) prize were Christ's College School in Guildford, Surrey; Clapham Manor Primary School in southwest London; and Oxford's Ashmolean Museum. A development in Bateman's Row in Shoreditch, east London, and Neues Museum, Berlin, were also shortlisted for the award.
Announcing the winner, Riba president Ruth Reed, said: "In Maxxi, we have a much-deserved winner, and I am delighted to award Zaha Hadid Architects with architecture's highest accolade." - (PA)