A construction site in Qatar. It ran with a Guardian news story. (Sean Gallup/AP)

Another reason to complain. (famousarchitect.blogspot.com)

That’s more lives than have been lost in some wars! How can “500 or more” migrant workers, mostly Indians, perish in the construction of a stadium? That is the cost, according to news reports, of work on Zaha Hadid’s soccer stadium in Qatar since 2012, excluding money. When asked about it, Hadid told the Guardian newspaper, “I have nothing to do with the workers. I think that’s an issue the government – if there’s a problem – should pick up. Hopefully, these things will be resolved.” Asked if she was concerned, Hadid added: “Yes, but I’m more concerned about the deaths in Iraq as well, so what do I do about that? I’m not taking it lightly but I think it’s for the government to look to take care of. It’s not my duty as an architect to look at it.”

When I first read of this on Friday I posted this comment:

 In 44 responses to Zaha’s remark, nobody mentioned that it was her Dukakis moment. Remember when Michael Dukakis, in a debate with Reagan veep George H.W. Bush during the 1988 presidential campaign, was asked whether, if his wife were raped and murdered, would he seek the death penalty for the killer? Dukakis gave a cold answer explaining his opposition to the death penalty without expressing any horror at the idea of his wife’s death. Many think it cost him the election.

But in fact, I believe Hadid’s response was worse, because a famous architect does indeed have in some degree a power of moral suasion over clients. Maybe she should not be designing stadiums for clients where working conditions are so poor that the death (if so) of hundreds in a construction project in the 21st century is conceivable. And if she must, she probably could have done something to improve those conditions, at least for this one job, and her cold response makes her thoughtlessness in that regard even more culpable, if not sinister – though I think at its top levels the practice of modern architecture is indeed sufficiently coldblooded and mercenary as to be dubbed sinister, if not evil.

I think almost any modern architect would have responded the same way as Hadid, and that the willingness to inflict such ugliness and sterility on a hapless world suggests an essential deficit in the makeup of the character of the profession as it is constituted today, at least at the level of the celebrity architect.