Zaha Hadid's second Stirling Prize

British architect Zaha Hadid has won the 2011 Stirling Prize for her design of a London school building, the Evelyn Grace Academy. She also won the award last year for the MAXXI Museum of 21st Century Arts in Rome. The award, now in its 16th year, is intended to recognise the best European building designed or built in Britain.  

You can read Vanessa Thorpe's story on the prize announcement in The Guardian at the link here. The newspaper also features a video presentation of the Stirling Prize finalists here.

Renzo Piano at Ronchamp

There's an interesting piece by Jonathan Glancey in The Guardian about a new convent designed by Renzo Piano at Ronchamp, which of course is also the site of Le Corbusier's revered Notre Dame du Haut chapel.

Much consternation surrounded the announcement that Piano was to create a building here, but the purists need not be worried about architectural sacrilege, as Glancey praises Piano's "quietly masterful" work in producing a convent that "wraps itself around contours of the hill, burrowing into the landscape like the strands of a rosary pressed gently into the earth". You can read his story and see more images of the convent at the link here. We'd like to go and visit right away...