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Doha’s World Cup stadium is now a sex toy

The toy is a trophy calling out the profligate spending, corruption, and death behind the stadium’s construction.

Doha’s World Cup stadium is now a sex toy

[Photo: David Ramos/Getty Images]

BY Nate Berg2 minute read

A unique honor has just been bestowed on one of the stadium’s designed for the 2022 FIFA World Cup, now underway in Qatar. Rendered in silicone as the architectural version of a device called the Fleshlight, the Zaha Hadid-designed Al Janoub soccer stadium, in Doha, has been turned into a sex toy.

[Image: Congress for Urban Malfeasance]

A group called the Congress for Urban Malfeasance created the unflattering award to honor “the most outstanding examples of financial promiscuity in the architectural and urban realm.” Along with two other sports stadiums in the U.S., the Doha stadium is being given this award for the high cost, corruption and human rights abuses it took to get built.

“Our winners have done so well, they can hit the showers . . . and the inside of this high-quality silicone,” says Shan Raoufi, one of the members of the naughtily acronymed group.

Raoufi’s New York-based architecture and design firm Wolfgang & Hite initiated this tongue-in-cheek award program back in 2019 with a set of dildos shaped like the towers of New York’s Hudson Yards, another real estate development project that received significant public funding. “The main thrust of our criticism is the use of public goods for enriching people that don’t necessarily need vast amounts of public money,” he says.

[Image: Congress for Urban Malfeasance]

The 2022 version of the group’s awards, and the sex toy trophies they’ve created, take a global view of the corrupt and unethical ways large real estate projects get funded. The two other stadiums awarded by the group are the Buffalo Bills stadium, which has been granted $850 million in public funding by the state of New York, and SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles, recipient of $100 million in tax breaks. The three stadiums “stand out for their corruption, over-spending, displacement, and death tolls,” according to the group.

[Photo: David Ramos/Getty Images]

Raoufi says that the Doha stadium represents the worst combination of these ills. When the first renderings of the Zaha Hadid-designed Al Janoub soccer stadium were released, commentators could not resist pointing out that, from above, the stadium looked like a vagina. The stadium’s anatomical resemblance has since been overshadowed by the realities of preparing Qatar to host the World Cup, which required the fast-forward construction of a wide range of urban infrastructure projects. Migrant laborers made up much of the labor force behind these works, and many worked under conditions human rights groups have equated to indentured servitude. An estimated 6,500 migrant workers died building projects related to the World Cup—a number many argue is an undercount.

Workers on the construction site at Al Janoub Stadium, 2018. [Photo: Karim Jaafar/AFP/Getty Images]

Raoufi says the Congress for Urban Malfeasance awards are an attempt to keep those deaths in people’s minds if they decide to watch the World Cup.

“There’s been so much criticism of Qatar and the labor practices, and it doesn’t seem like there’s been any real backlash. It all just feels like there’s no teeth to anyone’s concern. The whole world is aghast by these practices and yet we’re all watching this game that we’re addicted to,” he says. “No one dropped out. Everyone’s brand is on everything. Where’s our conscience? Where’s our compass?”

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Nate Berg is a staff writer at Fast Company, where he writes about design, architecture, urban development, and industrial design. He has written for publications including the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Atlantic, Wired, the Guardian, Dwell, Wallpaper, and Curbed More


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