Zaha Hadid Quotes

The commission process in America and England is different. In America, they do it through an interview process, and it's really based on whether they like you or not. I mean, it's nothing to do with whether you do the best scheme or the worst scheme.

I'm trying to discover - invent, I suppose - an architecture, and forms of urban planning, that do something of the same thing in a contemporary way. I started out trying to create buildings that would sparkle like isolated jewels; now I want them to connect, to form a new kind of landscape, to flow together with contemporary cities and the lives of their peoples.

Of course I believe imaginative architecture can make a difference to people's lives, but I wish it was possible to divert some of the effort we put into ambitious museums and galleries into the basic architectural building blocks of society.

People say I design architectural icons. If I design a building and it becomes an icon, that's ok.

I will always have two regrets. I don't have a presence in London, and I would have liked to have done more work in the Middle East.

I don't think that everybody in the planet should have a child. I've never had the desire I should have a kid.

Architecture is particularly difficult for women; there's no reason for it to be. I don't want to blame men or society, but I think it was for a long time, the clients were men, the building industry is all male.

Obviously for some people there is a big connection between music and the way you can create a space.

I am equally proud of all of my architectural projects. It's always rewarding to see an ambitious design become reality.

The funkiest housing in Holland is for low-income, and I think that's very nice.

I am sure that as a woman I can do a very good skyscraper.

I don't think people should do things because you know, 'I am turning this age, I must go have a husband.' If you find somebody and it works out then have kids, it's very nice. But if you don't, you don't.

People in power, they're so used to people kind of playing up to them.

Architecture is really about well-being. I think that people want to feel good in a space ... On the one hand it's about shelter, but it's also about pleasure.

Architecture is like writing. You have to edit it over and over so it looks effortless

I really love Miami, but I don't think the architecture matches the city. It's a bit too commercial.

I like music. Country, hip-hop, R&B, sometimes classical.

I miss aspects of being in the Arab world - the language - and there is a tranquility in these cities with great rivers. Whether it's Cairo or Baghdad, you sit there and you think, 'This river has flown here for thousands of years.' There are magical moments in these places.

I have been interested in fashion since I was a kid. Then I lived in London, where it was more about costume and a personal statement of who you are than about fashion.

Education, housing and hospitals are the most important things for society.

Wherever I am in the world, my perfect day begins with waking up and heading to the beach or the pool or somewhere I can be semi-comatose. I just wake up and go to the sun.

Good education is so important. We do need to look at the way people are taught. It not just about qualifications to get a job. It's about being educated.

I am quite sensitive to politics, because you know, as an Arab, an Iraqi, all your life, you are very conscious of it.

I always thought I was powerful, since I was a kid.

I love driving around east London - it's always full of surprises. Actually, I don't drive myself - I like to be driven.

Men think a woman should not have an opinion.

My generation were all careerists.

I'm into fashion because it contains the mood of the day, of the moment - like music, literature, and art.

My buildings are not particularly expensive. It is not a tin shed. If you want a tinny car, you pay for that.

No. I don't have the patience, and I'm not very tactful. People say I can be frightening.

Society has not been set up in a way that allows women to go back to work after taking time off. Many women now have to work as well as do everything at home and no one can do everything. Society needs to find a way of relieving women.

As a woman, I'm expected to want everything to be nice and to be nice myself. A very English thing. I don't design nice buildings - I don't like them. I like architecture to have some raw, vital, earthy quality.

For a woman to go out alone into architecture is still very, very hard. It's still a man's world.

I don't think I am that tough, actually. Well, tough in the sense that I don't take any rubbish, and that doesn't make me very popular, frankly. I mean, because some people say something to me, and I just tell them off. I mean, why should I put up with it?

When I first came to Guangzhou in 1981, it seemed such a hard and dour place with everyone in Chairman Mao uniforms.

When you are overworked and exhausted, there is a sense of kind of delirium and that's why I think architects do all-nighters and they kind of do those deadlines. For four days I remember doing four nights in one row with no sleep. I mean nobody, unless you are crazy, would do that, but you are totally focused on the project.

I made a decision when I was in school that I'd have a lot of male friends.

The paintings have only ever been ways of exploring architecture. I don't see them as art.

As a woman, you're not accessible to every world.

Half of architecture students are women, and you see respected, established female architects all the time.

It is insufficient for architecture today to directly implement an existing building typology; it instead requires architects to carefully examine the whole area with new interventions and programmatic typologies

Contrary to popular view, I've never been patronized in the Middle East. Men maybe treat women differently, but they do not treat them with disrespect. They don't hate women. It's a very different kind of mentality.

There are so many great galleries and museums in London, but they can be very crowded during the day.

Yes, I'm a feminist, because I see all women as smart, gifted and tough.

I am eccentric, I admit it, but I am not a nutcase.

I will never give myself the luxury of thinking, 'I've made it.'

What's nice about concrete is that it looks unfinished.

I've always thought that design can have equal importance to the idea of internal architecture. Professionally, things can be very dogmatic - you do the architecture, someone else does the interiors, someone else does the furniture, the fabric, etc. But I think design is all-encompassing.

It was such a depressing time. I didn't look very depressed, maybe, but it was really dire. I made a conscious decision not to stop, but it could have gone the other way.

Of course, my family helped me, my brothers helped me, but after I set up my own office I had to really help myself. Some people seem to think I had an oil well in my garden! It's a nice idea but not true.

I think it's good if areas get upgraded and gentrified, as long as the people who always lived there can stay. But they get pushed out to some place.

If I wanted to do clothes or if I wanted to make a building or design a choreography, you are able to do that - they are all under a similar kind of design umbrella.

When I was growing up in Iraq, there was an unbroken belief in progress and a great sense of optimism. It was a moment of nation building.

It's very important for cities all around the world to reinvent themselves, and Glasgow is a good example of that. The Scots are very nice. I don't think they are burdened by their history.

I'm a pushover. I make allowances for people if I like them.

I don't think that architecture is only about shelter, is only about a very simple enclosure. It should be able to excite you, to calm you, to make you think.

People often ask me if I consider myself to be an architect, fashion designer, or artist. I'm an architect. The paintings I've done are very important to me, but they were part of a process of thinking and developing.

When women do succeed, the press, even the industry press, spend far too much time talking about how we dress, what shoes we're wearing, who we're meant to be seeing. That's pretty sad for women, especially when it's written by women who really should know better.

I loved London. In the 1970s ... it was very exciting, really wild.

I used to not like being called a 'woman architect': I'm an architect, not just a woman architect. Guys used to tap me on the head and say, 'You are okay for a girl.' But I see the incredible amount of need from other women for reassurance that it could be done, so I don't mind that at all.