Zaha Hadid’s Al Janoub Stadium in Qatar
This podcast addresses the labor conditions in Qatar from an insider’s perspective, as I lived in Doha for eight years. It's a complex issue and, since it’s so vigorously shrouded in mystery, most reporters and journalists actually know very little about it - leaving the discourse on the subject hugely oversimplified. So it was very satisfying for me to get a prompt in my last semester of university’s Architecture of Race course that let me address a couple of matters at my heart - Zaha Hadid's yonic stadium and discrimination at the site of my adolescence.
I used to drive past this construction site every day on my way to school, while most Doha residents expected construction to be halted due to the stadium’s “scandalous” design. I support and extoll the insertion of this yonic form into the contemporary urban landscape, and it's hugely exciting to me that the project was carried out to completion.