ZAHA HADID, the award-winning architect who won the bid to design the aquatic park for London 2012, has been praised for her complex, groundbreaking work, but it is these qualities that have made her a controversial figure.

Before she won the Pritzker Prize last year for the Rosenthal Centre for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati, she was known as an architect with “more designs than buildings”, often unable to translate her radical vision into reality.

Lord Rothschild, the Pritzker Prize jury chairman, said of Hadid, the first woman to receive the award: “At the same time as her theoretical and academic work, as a practising architect, Zaha Hadid has been unswerving in her commitment to modernism. Always inventive, she’s moved away from existing typology, from high tech, and has shifted the geometry of buildings.”

According to observers, the award gave her much-needed credibility after previous setbacks. She attracted controversy in 1994 with her design for the Cardiff Bay Opera House, which many Welsh politicians considered to be elitist and one critic labelled a “deconstructed pigsty”. A BBC poll found that 88 per cent of people in Cardiff did not like the design. Despite winning the £49 million competition to build the opera house, beating nearly 300 architects, her design was eventually rejected for being “insufficiently distinctive”.

Although she first made her name in 1983 when she won a competition to design The Peak, a private club in Hong Kong, it was never built. Ten years later, the only significant building she had completed was the Vitra fire station in Weil am Rhein, southern Germany. “It’s very difficult to translate my ideas of space into a comprehensible image,” she said in an interview.

Her first significant work in the UK was the Millennium Dome’s Mind Zone, built in four sections, each designed to reveal the mysteries of the human brain. She was on the shortlist to design the Diana Memorial Fountain but lost out to Kathryn Gustafson, whose creation has been plagued with problems since it opened in July 2004.

Hadid was born in Baghdad in 1950 and knew from an early age that she wanted to be an architect. She studied at the American University of Beirut before arriving in Britain to study at the Architectural Association in 1972. She has won numerous competitions and her leading works include the Bergisel Ski Jump in Innsbruck, Austria, which has been compared to a high-heeled shoe, a cobra and a golf club; the Phaeno Science Centre in Wolfsburg, Germany; the Strasbourg Tram Station and the BMW Central Building in Leipzig, which was nominated for the prestigious Stirling Prize and has been compared to a “brilliant film set”.

She has often spoken about her status as an outsider in her profession, a nonconformist who is also a foreigner and female. “I am enormously patronised as a woman architect in this country,” she said. “Men always introduced me at lectures as ‘a woman architect’. Surely people can see I’m not a man in drag.”