Different projects give you satisfaction in different ways.

In Iraq, many of my female friends were architects and professionals with a lot of power during the 1980s while all the men were at war in Iran.

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

All the privileged can travel, see different worlds, not everyone can. I think it is important for people to have an interesting locale nearby.

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

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.

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.