Zaha Hadid
I don't particularly like showing furniture on pedestals, but for whatever reasons you always have to in museums.
My father was a politician, and a very important politician, and one of the leaders of the Iraqi Democratic Party, who believed in progress.
There are so many great galleries and museums in London, but they can be very crowded during the day.
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.
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.
All the privileged can travel, see different worlds; not everyone can. I think it is important for people to have an interesting locale nearby.
My buildings are not particularly expensive. It is not a tin shed. If you want a tinny car, you pay for that.
My friendships are very important to me.
The funkiest housing in Holland is for low-income, and I think that's very nice.
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.
There are 360 degrees, so why stick to one?Collection: Degrees
A brilliant design will always benefit from the input of others.Collection: Design
Architecture is like writing. You have to edit it over and over so it looks effortlessCollection: Writing
You have to really believe not only in yourself; you have to believe that the world is actually worth your sacrifices.Collection: Inspirational
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.Collection: Badass
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.Collection: Jewels
You really have to have a goal. The goal posts might shift, but you should have a goal. Know what it is you want to find out.Collection: Inspirational
The beauty of the landscape - where sand, water, reeds, birds, buildings, and people all somehow flowed together - has never left me.Collection: People
Indeed, our designs become more ambitious as we see the new possibilities created by the technology of other industries.Collection: Technology
I used to not like being called a 'woman architect.' I'm an architect, not just a woman architect. The guys used to tap me on the head and say 'you're OK for a girl.' But I see an incredible amount of need from other women for reassurance that it can be done, so I don't mind anymore.Collection: Girl
Know what it is that you are trying to find out.Collection: Trying
You have to be very focused and work very hard, but it is not about working hard without knowing what your aim is!Collection: Knowing
Yes, I'm a feminist, because I see all women as smart, gifted and tough.Collection: Women
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. The intention is to really carve out of a city civic spaces and the more it is accessible to a much larger mass in public and it's about people enjoying that space. That makes life that much better. If you think about housing, education, whether schools and hospitals, these are all very interesting projects because in the way you interpret this special experience.Collection: School
I am eccentric, I admit it, but I am not a nutcase.Collection: Eccentric
Different projects give you satisfaction in different ways.Collection: Giving
Malevitch discovered abstraction as an experimental principle that can propel creative work to previously unheard levels of invention; this abstract work allowed much greater levels of creativity.Collection: Creativity
The goal posts might shift, but you should have a goal.Collection: Should Have
No. I don't have the patience, and I'm not very tactful. People say I can be frightening.Collection: Teaching
In terms of form, all the projects interest me equally, although there are obviously large differences according to the scale and process of each project.Collection: Differences
The paintings have only ever been ways of exploring architecture. I don't see them as art.Collection: Art
It's not my duty as an architect to look at it.Collection: Looks
If I'm in london it can be different than if I'm somewhere else.Collection: Somewhere Else
I've always been interested in combining architecture with a social agenda, and I really think you can invest and be inventive with hospitals and housing.Collection: Thinking
You really have to have a goal.Collection: Goal
There are some very similar moments in the early work where the focus was on drawing, abstraction and fragmentation. Then it moved to the development of ideas. Lately it has become what architecture should be, which is more fluid organization. There has not been so much 'a change' but 'a development'.Collection: Organization
One has to strive for a very open liberal society.Collection: Strive
They all come out from the same thing; all the projects are connected somehow.Collection: Projects
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.Collection: Fashion
It would be very interesting to design objects for everyday life, something where the ideas that are expressed can be launched into society.Collection: Ideas
As a woman you're not accessible to every world.Collection: World
There is a strong reciprocal relationship whereby our more ambitious design visions encourage the continuing development of the new digital technologies and fabrication techniques, and those new developments in turn inspire us to push the design envelope ever further.Collection: Strong
Some people really live and work within the same doctrine, the same diagram with the same logic.Collection: People
All the privileged can travel, see different worlds, not everyone can. I think it is important for people to have an interesting locale nearby.Collection: Thinking
My earliest memory of architecture, I was perhaps 6 or 7 years old, was of my aunt building a house in mosul in the north of iraq. The architect was a close friend of my father's and he used to come to our house with the drawings and models. I remember seeing the model in our living room and I think it triggered something, as I was completely intrigued by it.Collection: Memories
The conservative values that are emerging, it may not effect architecture immediately but it will effect society and that's what worries me.Collection: Worry
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.Collection: Depression
Of course there is a lot of fluidity now between art, architecture and fashion - a lot more cross-pollination in the disciplines, but this isn't about competition, it's about collaboration and what these practices and processes can contribute to one another.Collection: Fashion
Too many are too obsessed by method. it becomes a dogma.Collection: Dogma