Dame Zaha’s career was forged through controversy

We were in Hadid’s showroom in Clerkenwell, which, she said, was a lot like her home, an old warehouse around the corner (she lives alone). The showroom is a rather sterile space full of her own furniture designs, including milled marble stools that look like plastic and plexi tables that look like glass. On the floor below are shoes made out of recycled rubber and skyscraper models that could be works of art.

She is proud of the Royal Gold Medal because it is an endorsement from her adoptive country. “I made a choice to live in the UK; I work here, my office is based here, I was educated here,” she said.

Now 65, the Iraqi-born architect has lived in London since 1972 when she was a student at the Arch­itectural Association, but still speaks with a slight Middle-Eastern accent. “I would like to get more work here — I get hardly anything. I know London so well. I’ve been travelling across it since I was a student. I’ve seen the transformation of the city. It’s sometimes frustrating that I don’t have any work here. I would love to build a tower in London.”

Hadid’s career was forged through controversy, from the first rows over the proposed Cardiff Bay Opera House in the 1990s that propelled her to fame — she won three rounds of competition only for the design to be left unfunded — to her most recent furore over the 2020 Tokyo Olympic stadium. Again, Hadid’s design won the inter­nat­ional competition but she was rep­laced by a Japanese arch­itect at the end of last year. “They wanted a national stadium and through that they applied for the Olympics,” she said. “We won and worked on it for nearly three years, but it seems they just wanted Japanese.”

Hadid’s practice has so far refused to give up the copyright to the designs in return for a final payment, amid concerns that some components of the replacement scheme by Kengo Kuma are similar to those proposed by Hadid. Kuma denies appropriating her work. Hadid’s lawyers are busy.

The biggest controversy of all, however, must be her work for the Qataris, the subject of the toe-curling BBC Radio 4 interview in which Sarah Montague alleged that more than 1,200 migrant workers had died while working on Hadid’s Al-Wakrah stadium. This was incorrect, there have been no deaths there, and the BBC apologised for having got its facts wrong. Hadid has not taken legal action against the corporation, although she did sue the New York Review of Books, which first made the accusation. (She eventually accepted a settlement from the magazine and donated an undisclosed sum to a labour rights charity.)

In fact, there is little accurate information on how many foreign workers have died during construction for the World Cup and other projects, but a reputable rep­ort in 2014 by the surveyors DLA Piper said 964 workers from Nepal, India and Bangladesh had died in Qatar in 2012 and 2013, although there were no fatalities on the Al-Wakrah site. When pressed on the issue of the treatment of migrant workers, Hadid responded simply: “I’ve done my bit.”

Her right hand, with a bracelet that seems to be based on the roofline of the Riverside Museum in Glasgow, almost never stopped rolling around as she expanded on an opinion. It paused for a moment when I asked her what she meant by her answer. “I’ve always been defending the stadia in Qatar and I think they [the Qataris] should now do something [themselves] . . . I’ve done my bit.”

Why did she walk out of the BBC interview? Surely it was an opportunity to defend the project? “It was not an appropriate thing to do in a radio car outside my house. I’m not a defender of the Qatari situation, but it’s important to get the facts right.

“In any country one should do public and cultural work: you can’t boycott the people. It’s important that we give these countries good schools, good hospitals, good museums, good housing. And there are certain projects I will never do — I will never design a prison.”

She is angry that the BBC chose to go on the offensive as the award was announced. “They had a right to ask me whatever they liked, but when I had just won the Royal Gold Medal, I thought they shouldn’t necessarily congratulate me, but talk more generally about my work. Going straight on the attack was not appropriate.”

Were baubles important to her? She has, after all, won the Stirling prize twice in consecutive years and the Pritzker, perhaps the most illustrious, in 2004 — the first woman to do so. She was even made a dame in 2012, after building the London Aquatics Centre for the 2012 Olympic Games.

Some past slights continue to rankle, though. She was invited to the opening ceremony of the Lon­don Aquatics Centre, where she met the Queen, but complains that she was not offered tickets to see her pool in action during the Games. Eventually she protested to Boris Johnson, the mayor, that she had had to obtain tickets on the black market. She said he replied: “Don’t ever mention it to anyone.” She did not until now, if only to spare his blushes.

Was she difficult to work for? “I don’t think so. They say I am. People on the outside say I am.” She shrugged. How did she deal with criticism? She seemed surprisingly sanguine: “When we started the Dongdaemun Design Plaza [in Seoul, South Korea] everyone hated it. Now it’s had 17 million visitors and is second in popularity only to the Louvre worldwide.”

Hadid’s class at Yale is evenly split between the sexes, and she ­believes the next generation of women architects will not allow them­selves to be pushed to the sidelines as some of her own did. Her practice, she said, was now 40 per cent female. “The new generation has more perseverance. I’ve taught for 30 years and in the last 25 the best people have been women. It’s not easy to do everything, and society has to make it easier for women to work: the most difficult thing is childcare. That’s the way they can be helped.”

Hadid has collected awards for buildings from Brixton (the Evelyn Grace Academy) to China (the Guangzhou Opera House) and is working on projects ranging from an energy research centre in Riy­adh, Saudi Arabia, to the new £632 million Iraqi parliament. It is a project dear to her heart because her father, Mohammed, who died in 1999, was a prominent politician, democracy advocate and, briefly, minister of finance before the Ba’ath party came to power in 1963. Work is due to commence shortly.

She ended by saying that architecture was having a renaissance. What part did she think she had played and still had to play. After all, at 65, she was a youngster. Her former mentor, Rem Koolhaas, is 71; Frank Gehry, a friend, is 86. “I’d like to think I’m someone who stirred it up a bit. I’m damed and whatever, so not totally on the outside, but I’ve been an agent provocateur — I questioned certain things and perceptions changed.

“I’ve enjoyed doing it all despite the hurdles. If you give in, it’s the end. You have to believe in what you do.”

She smiled broadly again, and added: “And in architecture, nobody ever retires.”