"I can't recall an article about or interview with Zaha Hadid in which she is not described as a diva."

From the Financial Times

This is an indictment of a profession and press which believes itself liberal and progressive, but it also makes the award of the Pritzker prize, architecture's most prestigious award next weekend, an unprecedented and important event.

Hadid is the world's foremost woman architect. Yet, until a recent explosion in work, she had built little. This is an award more for influence than for physical impact on the world.

Hadid's extraordinary designs have been instantly recognisable and seemingly omnipresent for more than two decades, well before she had realised any significant structures.

Her early conceptual work and competition entries were heavily influenced by Russian suprematism and constructivism, dynamic shapes on a neutral ground; spiky, shattered elements scattered across the site.

The images of Hadid's buildings became staples of the tide of publications about deconstruction which dominated architectural debate in the late 1980s. Her seductive paintings of fragmented cityscapes became an antidote to the self-referential pomposity of postmodernism and the crushing banality of British development.

But Hadid, despite her influence, was often dismissed as a dreamer, whose work was unrealisable and impractical. The memory of this dismissal makes the breadth of her current portfolio extremely surprising.

With the recent successful opening of Cincinatti's Museum of Modern Art and a slew of large-scale schemes under construction in the US and continental Europe, the turnaround has been rapid.

The one place that has so far ignored her is, of course, her home, the UK. When we met in a Kensington café, I asked about this rejection by her long-adopted home. "I've been in London 30 years now [Hadid was born and brought up in Iraq], a lifetime, or at least it feels like a lifetime.

I used to be bothered by not being able to build here much more before. There were all these projects that I felt I could contribute to." How did she account for it? "I think the British are reluctant to invest in an idea. Fashion is the best example - look at Vivienne Westwood and her talent, everybody ripped her off, and Hussein Chalayan, how could he be out of business, the most talented guy on the scene. The brilliant designers here are beginning to be successful but they're financed by foreign companies."

Hadid came to study at the Architectural Association in London in 1972. The association was, during the 1970s and 1980s, a laboratory of the weird and wonderful, and its teachers and students have gone on to dominate international architectural culture; Daniel Libeskind, Bernhard Tschumi, Nigel Coates and Rem Koolhaas (for whom Hadid later worked) were contemporaries.

But the school's cosmopolitanism and un- English intellectualism ensured that it was treated with suspicion, as a school for wealthy foreign dilettantes. Some of that suspicion has apparently stuck to Hadid (who went on to teach at the association for many years as well as at Harvard, Columbia and Chicago), culminating 10 years ago in the Cardiff opera house debacle when Hadid won the competition but was snubbed, the money going towards the city's stadium instead.

"A lot of people thought after Cardiff I'd get a lot of work in the UK," Hadid says. "But I thought I'd be stigmatised." Does she still hope or expect to build in Britain? "Perhaps I'll have to put an ad in the papers. Give me a project. Please."

So, with the opportunities elsewhere, what keeps Hadid anchored in London? "It would certainly be nice to visit a site without having to take a plane. But something has changed radically here recently. There is no resistance to the new any more. Eventually this will filter through into building. England being part of Europe is the most positive thing that could have happened. We used to go to Paris to do the things we enjoyed, sitting in a café, having a good coffee, eating a nice salad, the simple things in life. Now they're all here."

I turn to the inevitable question about gender. Some will undoubtedly say this award is being given at least in part because she is a woman. How, if at all, does being a woman architect affect practice?

"I think it has allowed me to get away with more. I had more leeway as an Iraqi and as a woman. If I'd been a man, and English, people would have been able to read me more clearly."

The other question I feel bound to ask is about Iraq. Hadid's father was a Baghdad industrialist and an influential politician in the brief and ill-fated democratic interlude before the Ba' athist regime came to power in 1963.

Studying at the London School of Economics he became leader of the National Democratic party, devoted to the foundation of a modern, secular, democratic state. Whe,n however, I ask a direct question about how she feels about Iraq, she clams up for the first time in the interview. She looks away, not offended, but nervous. "I can't comment," she replies. "All I know is what I see on TV. It's a tragedy because it was a secular society." Her answer tails off.

However, she perks up as we revert to buildings and regains the fluency and charm she has displayed throughout. What was it, I asked, that generated those complex and convoluted forms which have characterised her work? "It was a reaction against existing typologies. It was a breaking up of the core to create fluid space. There were also these ideas about distortion, the three points of perspective. I wasn't interested in extrusion and repetition." If Hadid has a weakness, it is in justifying and explaining her work.

Her contemporaries, also creating complex, fragmented architectural visions, were obsessed with text and semiotics, their architecture derived (if sometimes spuriously) from an engagement with post- structuralist thought. Architecture was systematically disassembled as literature had been by Derrida and others.

Hadid's work became known not through discourse or building but through her striking paintings, bird's-eye perspectives of dynamic sites packed with explosive energy. "I couldn't really draw what I was thinking," she explains. "The paintings became well-known because they were constantly being published, while our architectural plans were not." These designs have been accused of ignoring physical reality, of putting style before substance. She counters: "structure was always part of the story, yet people didn't see it. To achieve complexity and spatiality we've had to develop very interesting, sophisticated structures."

The testament to this development is in the powerfully elegant and complex concrete structures emerging from the ground at Wolfsburg, where Hadid's office has designed the new Science Centre. The monolithic, sculptural forms represent a significant move away from the spikiness of her earlier work.

The plan of the Science Centre, like that of the BMW Central Building in Leipzig and the plans for Soho City (referred to by her office as the Fluid City) in Beijing resemble geological strata worn away by flows and currents. It is a major change in architectural language and one that perhaps tacitly acknowledges the impracticalities and alienating quality of earlier designs.

Finally, does she think she deserves the Pritzker? "I don't know how to answer that," she replies. "But the amount of emails and flowers I've received - some people must think I deserve it. Women would actually come up to me, particularly in New York, in restaurants, to congratulate me.

When I lecture all over the world, women come up to me all the time to tell me how encouraged they are. I think it shows that you can actually break through the glass ceiling. I don't want to be seen as a woman architect but if it helps other women believe that they can achieve something . . . "