Zaha Hadid has been announced as the winner of the 2016 RIBA Royal Gold Medal for architecture.
Hadid is the first woman to be sole recipient of the 167-year-old accolade. Three previous female winners – Sheila O’Donnell (2015), Patty Hopkins (1994) and Ray Eames (1979) – were all recognised alongside their husbands and practice partners.
Given in recognition of a lifetime’s work, the Gold Medal is approved by the Queen and is given to a person or group of people who have had a significant influence “either directly or indirectly on the advancement of architecture”.
Past Royal Gold Medallists include Frank Gehry (2000), Norman Foster (1983), Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1959), Le Corbusier (1953), Frank Lloyd Wright (1941) and George Gilbert Scott (1859).
RIBA President and chair of the selection committee, Jane Duncan, said: “Zaha Hadid is a formidable and globally-influential force in architecture. Highly experimental, rigorous and exacting, her work from buildings to furniture, footwear and cars, is quite rightly revered and desired by brands and people all around the world.
“I am delighted Zaha will be awarded the Royal Gold Medal in 2016 and can’t wait to see what she and her practice will do next.”
But the news of Hadid’s achievement was overshadowed by a heated interview on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that led to the architect hanging up on presenter Sarah Montague.
The interview included persistent questioning over worker deaths in Qatar, with Montague apparently under the mistaken impression that there had been deaths at the site of Hadid’s World Cup Al Wakrah stadium.
Montague’s opener was: “One of your buildings is the Qatar stadium where there have been considerable problems, not least the number of deaths.”
To which Hadid replied: “There haven’t been any problems, actually, I have to put you right. There hasn’t been a single problem in our stadium in Qatar.”
Hadid also referred to the fact that she had sued the New York Review of Books for making claims about worker deaths on the World Cup site in Qatar. The settlement from her defamation case against the New York Review of Books was donated to an unnamed labour rights organisation.
Montague then followed up with questions on the 2020 Olympic Stadium in Tokyo, where Zaha Hadid Architects’ original competition-winning design was dropped by the Japanese government, and the practice was then unable to secure a contractor partner to launch a bid for the new competition.
After Montague interrupted Hadid’s response to allegations that she had “walked off” the project, the architect said: “No, but listen to me – let’s stop this conversation right now. I don’t want to carry on, thank you very much,” before hanging up.
Hadid was questioned over the World Cup stadium in Qatar
Responding to the issue, an RIBA spokesman said: “The RIBA was surprised and disappointed by the focus of the Radio 4 Today programme interview with Dame Zaha Hadid this morning. Of course the BBC has a right to explore controversial issues, but we are very saddened that the interview failed to give appropriate weight to today’s celebration – Dame Zaha being named as the recipient of one of the world’s most important honours.”
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.
Seven hours after the interview originally aired, the BBC issued an apology over the Qatar questioning. Its statement said: “The ITUC’s [International Trades Union Confederation] figure of 1,200 construction deaths which was quoted on this morning’s programme refers to the whole of Qatar, and not specifically to the main World Cup stadium site. We are sorry we didn’t make this clear in this morning’s interview with Dame Zaha Hadid. We are happy to accept there is no evidence of deaths at the main stadium site.”
Listen to the full interview here
