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.

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.

I can't focus when there's too many things around. Whenever I used to go to the office, I used to always say, 'Tidy up.'

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

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.

Two years ago I focused on one apartment to see how many variations you can come up with in a given space with the same parameters. I would work on this repeatedly for days and you see that there is maybe seven hundred options for one space. This exercise gives you an idea of the degree at which you can interpret the organization of space, it is not infinite but it's very large.

Would they call me a diva if I were a guy?