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.

For many years, I hated nature. As a student, I refused to put a plant anywhere - a living plant, that is. Dead plants were OK.

From my first days studying architecture at the architectural association, I have always been interested in the concept of fragmentation and with ideas of abstraction and explosion, where we were de-constructing ideas of repetitiveness and mass production.

People don't talk to you properly. It's the way they talk to you; they dismiss you. I think it's a combination of me being a woman and a foreigner.

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

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

They all come out from the same thing; all the projects are connected somehow.