The best British building of the year is a school by Zaha Hadid

London - The best British building of 2011 is a futuristic school building in South London, designed by architect Zaha Hadid. She has thus become the recipient of the prestigious Stirling Prize for the second consecutive time, defeating, among others, the favored studio of Michael Hopkins, which competed with the construction of the velodrome for the London 2012 Olympic Games.
The jury praised the Evelyn Grace Academy school in the London district of Brixton as a "highly stylized serpent of glass and steel." "This is how every school could and should look. A unique project, skillfully placed on an extraordinarily small construction site, well serves the school's sports specialization," stated Angela Brady, Chair of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA).
The Stirling Prize, which comes with a reward of £20,000 (approximately 550,000 crowns), was awarded to Hadid in competition with five other finalist projects. Among them, besides the Olympic velodrome, was a proposal for a new building for the Royal Shakespeare Company's theater ensemble by Bennetts Associates or the Folkwang Museum in Essen, designed by David Chipperfield.
The Stirling Prize, awarded to British architects, has this year been won for the second consecutive time by the 61-year-old creator of Iraqi descent. Last year, she made her mark with the design of the modern art museum MAXXI in Rome. In 1999, the Future Systems studio of Jan Kaplický received the prize for the media center at the cricket stadium in London.