Zaha Hadid's winning of the 2004 Pritzker Architecture Prize should bring more commissions to the brilliant, Baghdad-born architect, and more attention to her breakthrough design in Cincinnati.

The Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art, which opened here last year, was Hadid's first American commission. It helped dispel the rap against her that her designs were audacious but mostly unbuildable. Since then, her 60-person firm in London has been flooded with commissions.

Lois and Richard Rosenthal and other donors deserve great credit for having the courage to support a talent then only on the threshold of producing major works. The new stand-alone Contemporary Arts Center at Sixth and Walnut added to Cincinnati's growing stock of world-class buildings. Through major new buildings, we make lasting statements about who we are and the urban future we want to build here. We need to make sure projects such as a new Brent Spence bridge also express our highest design aspirations.

Hadid, 53, is the first woman to win architecture's prestigious international award. In naming her this year's winner, Pritzker jurors singled out the Rosenthal museum, a fire station in Germany and her spectacular Bergisel Ski Jump tower in Innsbruck, Austria. Architect Frank Gehry, one of the seven jurors and a past Pritzker winner himself, also designed a Cincinnati building, the Vontz Center for Molecular Studies on University of Cincinnati's medical campus. Gehry said of Hadid's buildings: "Each project unfolds with new excitement and innovation." Hadid credits Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, with sparking greater interest in her work.

Hadid is also a visiting professor at Yale and professor at Vienna's University of Applied Arts. She believes inventive architecture can change the way we think and live in cities. Her exterior and interior designs shatter symmetrical right angles and seem in constant motion, shifting shape when seen from different angles. Hadid's selection for the $100,000 Pritzker prize, to be awarded May 31 in St. Petersburg, Russia, further affirms that innovation is the "language" of the future.