Zaha Hadid, the famous Pritzker-prize winning startchitect, reportedly sued Martin Filler - a prominent architecture critic - after he made some uniformed comments about Hadid's response to the death of construction workers building the Al-Wakrah Stadium in Qatar.
In his review for a book by Rowan Moore, Fuller wrote:
"She has unashamedly disavowed any responsibility, let alone concern, for the estimated one thousand laborers who have perished while constructing her project thus far. 'I have nothing to do with the workers,' Hadid has claimed. 'It is not my duty as an architect to look at it.'"
This didn't go down well with the British-Iraqi startchitect and she filed a defamation lawsuit against Fuller seeking damages, a retraction of the statements made and immediate halt of the review, The Guardian reports.
Hadid's lawsuit claims that the review questions her success and characterizes "her personality as difficult".
"It is a personal attack disguised as a book review and has exposed Ms. Hadid to public ridicule and contempt, depriving her of confidence and injuring her good name and reputation," Hadid's lawyers were quoted by Curbed.
Zaha Hadid has often been the target of bad press, but she usually keeps her calm and shrugs off the controversies. But this time, her lawyers say, she took a calculated decision to file the lawsuit because she thought her profession and career was at stake.
In response to the lawsuit, Filler has now issued an apology that claims he had stated some facts wrongly and that he "regrets the error".
"I wrote that an 'estimated one thousand laborers ... have perished while constructing her project [Al-Wakrah Stadium] thus far'. However, work did not begin on the site for the Al Wakrah stadium, until two months after Ms Hadid made those comments; and construction is not scheduled to begin until 2015," Filler explained in his correction-apology.
"There have been no worker deaths on the Al Wakrah project and Ms Hadid's comments about Qatar that I quoted in the review had nothing to do with the Al Wakrah site or any of her projects. I regret the error," he added.
The Al-Wakrah stadium has been receiving a lot of heat from critics and rivals alike; not just for its apparent "vagina-like" form, but also because a staggering number of migrant construction workers, earning just $0.70 an hour, are dying in the country while building the sites.
Hadid and the counsel are reportedly reviewing the apology and will respond after careful consideration, Reuters reports.
