Attention, attention. There’s a football stadium in Qatar that looks a lot like female genitalia, and the internet wants you to gawk at it.
Yes, outlets like The Guardian, The Independent and Buzzfeed are aesthetically correct in comparing the Al Wakrah World Cup Stadium design to a vagina. With its labia-like exterior, pinkish coloring and perfectly placed opening, it’s easy to see less a state-of-the-art athletic center meant to combat Qatar’s scorching summer heat, and more a giant, flowering vagina that only happens to house 40,000 spectators and cost $140 billion.
We’ll even give it to Buzzfeed et al for pointing out this hilariously NSFW GIF(clipped from an Al Wakrah Stadium teaser video), which turns the unlucky viewer into a strange sort of architectural voyeur.
But vagina-likenesses aside, the football (read: soccer, if you’re in the U.S.) stadium was designed by world-renowned architect Zaha Hadid, a little fact some news outlets left out. Hadid, the first woman to ever win the Pritzker Architecture Prize, who has been included in more art world listicles than we can count on our hands, should not have to see her work reviewed without attribution. No matter how sensual the end product makes us feel.
Hadid has commented on the “male-dominated” nature of the architecture realm before, so we doubt she’d be happy to see The Guardian misattribute her latest design feat Vagina Stadium to male “bigwigs” (Hadid is a vagina-equipped female).
Essentially, we’re glad someone’s pinpointed the perfect anatomical parallel to Hadid’s admittedly yonic creation, but let’s not forget to slap a “Made by Zaha Hadid” label on any assessment. In the end, we can forgive The Guardian because we like this simple explanation:
“In a world where sport and vaginas very rarely come together with such prominence (see every UK female footballer’s salary versus every UK male footballer’s salary), [the stadium design] can only be a good thing. And after all, why not have 45,000 people crammed inside a woman’s reproductive system? It’s not like they haven’t been there before.”
By the way, the stadium is actually “inspired by the dhow boat that carried generations of local fishermen and pearl divers” in Qatar, in case you were interested/have stopped staring at the vagina.
Source: HuffPost
“[katogoaward]”