Warshavsky, a top US attorney and the lead lawyer to the trust trying to recover assets for clients defrauded by US financier Bernard Madoff, said construction was not due to begin on the football stadium designed by Hadid until 2015.

Hadid is seeking damages, a halt to the review's continued publication and a retraction.

Hadid, a dame of the British Empire, became the first female and first Muslim to win the most prestigious Pritzker Prize in architecture in 2004. She won the Stirling Prize in 2010 and 2011 and has featured on numerous media lists of the most influential people in the world.

Reuters reported last Thursday that Robert Silvers, editor of the New York Review of Books, said he was unaware of the complaint and declined to comment .

The lawsuit prompted comments both positive and negative on social media. "Zaha strikes back!" read one comment on Twitter. But she was also mocked on Twitter for suing the magazine and Filler.

Paul Goldberger, the former architecture critic of the New Yorker and former dean of the prestigious Parsons design college in New York, now a contributor to Vanity Fair, sent out a tweet saying that her lawsuit was unwise and would gain her a reputation as "the architect who sues critics".

He further tweeted: "Zaha proves Goldberger's Law: the greater the success the thinner the skin."