Women are always told, 'You're not going to make it, its too difficult, you can't do that, don't enter this competition, you'll never win it,' - they need confidence in themselves and people around them to help them to get on.

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.

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.

With products the form is almost the finished piece, but with architecture it is not.

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

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

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.