Last May the Washington Post printed an article claiming that 1,200 migrant workers had already died in Qatar since December 2010, when the country had been awarded the World Cup, and predicted that the death toll would rise to 4,000 by the time the football tournament took place. Today (Sept. 24), she also became the first women in 167 years to win the Royal Gold Medal award presented by the Royal Institute of British Architects for a body of work.
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She opened her own practice in London in 1979 and in 2004 she became the first female recipient of the Pritzker, considered the equivalent of the Nobel prize for architecture.
Awarded since 1848, previous Royal Gold Medallists include Frank Gehry, Norman Foster and Frank Lloyd Wright.
“You should check your information before you say anything”.
“I am very proud to be awarded the Royal Gold Medal, and in particular to be the first woman to receive the honour in her own right”, said Ms Hadid.
According to the Architect’s Journal, architect Julyan Wickham of Wickham van Eyck Architects and Tom Pike, partner at Giles Pike Architects & Interior Designers, wrote letters to the BBC demanding the an apology from the organisation for the way Hadid was treated.
The interview then moved away from Qatar to Hadid’s canned Tokyo Olympic stadium design which sparked her exit from the interview, “let’s stop this conversation right now”, she said before leaving Montague with dead air to fill. “I don’t want to carry on, thank you very much”, before hanging up.
At the beginning of this year, the architect settled a lawsuit against the New York Review of Books and critic Martin Filler, regarding defamatory comments made about her attitude to migrant workers and her Qatar World Cup stadium project.
No construction workers are known to have died while working on her stadium in Doha, but campaigners claim that more than 1,000 employees have died on construction projects linked to the controversial World Cup.
“Many of our chattering classes and not a few fellow architects have treated her with characteristic faint praise”, Prof Cook said.
The interview had begun with Montague asking Hadid about her “scary” reputation. I think that’s an issue the government – if there’s a problem – should pick up’.
Hadid referred to her failed bid to build Tokyo’s 2020 Olympics stadium as a “scandal”, adding: “I pulled out because we had no contractor to go with”.
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“Zaha Hadid is a formidable and globally-influential force in architecture”, says RIBA President and chair of the selection committee, Jane Duncan. We are sorry we didn’t make this clear in this morning’s interview with Dame Zaha Hadid. But I see the incredible amount of need from other women for reassurance that it could be done, so I don’t mind that at all.
