A Letter Correcting and Apologizing for a Statement About Zaha Hadid

To the Editors:

In my review of Rowan Moore’s Why We Build: Power and Desire in Architecture [NYR, June 5], I quoted comments by the architect Zaha Hadid, who designed the Al Wakrah stadium in Qatar, when she was asked in London in February 2014 about revelations a week earlier in The Guardian that hundreds of migrant laborers had died while working on construction projects in Qatar. I wrote that an “estimated one thousand laborers…have perished while constructing her project 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. 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.

Martin Filler
New York City