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.

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

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.

My father was a politician, and a very important politician, and one of the leaders of the Iraqi Democratic Party, who believed in progress.

The conservative values that are emerging, it may not effect architecture immediately but it will effect society and that's what worries me.

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

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.