Cardiff Bay Opera House

In December of 1995, three days before Christmas, one of the most brilliant architectural minds of the twentieth century received a letter that effectively declared her vision unwanted.

For two years, Zaha Hadid had fought through three separate grueling international competitions to design the Cardiff Bay Opera House in Wales.

She won every single round against the most celebrated firms in Europe.

Yet, faced with intense political backlashes, institutional anxiety over an Iraqi-born woman who refused to make her buildings smaller or safer, and the preference for a traditional national rugby stadium, funding was quietly withdrawn.

"They have finally said yes." It will take three years for the world to finish saying no.

The first challenge to her victory comes almost immediately, and it comes dressed in the language of process rather than prejudice, which is how these things nearly always begin.

Lord Crickhowell, the former Welsh secretary who chairs the Cardiff Bay Opera House Trust, is by all accounts an honorable man, careful, methodical, deeply invested in seeing the opera house built and equally invested in seeing it built without controversy.

He looks at the result of the first round, a young, still relatively unknown woman, an outsider both to Wales and in some deeper sense the coming years will make explicit to the in-spoken assumptions of who gets to design a nation's cultural monuments, and he does something that will come to look in retrospect like the opening move of a slow and grinding chess match.