Zaha Hadid Quotes

One has to strive for a very open liberal society.

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

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

There is a strong reciprocal relationship whereby our more ambitious design visions encourage the continuing development of the new digital technologies and fabrication techniques, and those new developments in turn inspire us to push the design envelope ever further.

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.

When I taught, all my best students were women.

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.

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

I find industrial cities exciting. I like their toughness.

There are so many great galleries and museums in London, but they can be very crowded during the day.

It was such a depressing time. I didn't look very depressed, maybe, but it was really dire. I made a conscious decision not to stop, but it could have gone the other way.

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.

Architecture is like writing. You have to edit it over and over so it looks effortless

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

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.

I have been interested in fashion since I was a kid. Then I lived in London, where it was more about costume and a personal statement of who you are than about fashion.

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

I have always appreciated those who dare to experiment with materials and proportions.

Malevitch discovered abstraction as an experimental principle that can propel creative work to previously unheard levels of invention; this abstract work allowed much greater levels of creativity.

The spirit of adventure to embrace the new and the incredible belief in the power of invention attracted me to the Russian avant-garde.

Architecture is really about well-being. I think that people want to feel good in a space ... On the one hand it's about shelter, but it's also about pleasure.

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.

I made a decision when I was in school that I'd have a lot of male friends.

Too many are too obsessed by method. it becomes a dogma.

When you are overworked and exhausted, there is a sense of kind of delirium and that's why I think architects do all-nighters and they kind of do those deadlines. For four days I remember doing four nights in one row with no sleep. I mean nobody, unless you are crazy, would do that, but you are totally focused on the project.

Some people really live and work within the same doctrine, the same diagram with the same logic.

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

Of course there is a lot of fluidity now between art, architecture and fashion - a lot more cross-pollination in the disciplines, but this isn't about competition, it's about collaboration and what these practices and processes can contribute to one another.

If I'm in london it can be different than if I'm somewhere else.

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.

Indeed, our designs become more ambitious as we see the new possibilities created by the technology of other industries.

People say I design architectural icons. If I design a building and it becomes an icon, that's ok.

I don't particularly like showing furniture on pedestals, but for whatever reasons you always have to in museums.

I don't use the computer. I do sketches, very quickly, often more than 100 on the same formal research.

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.

Architecture is really about well-being. I think that people want to feel good in a space... On the one hand it's about shelter, but it's also about pleasure. The intention is to really carve out of a city civic spaces and the more it is accessible to a much larger mass in public and it's about people enjoying that space. That makes life that much better. If you think about housing, education, whether schools and hospitals, these are all very interesting projects because in the way you interpret this special experience.

There are some very similar moments in the early work where the focus was on drawing, abstraction and fragmentation. Then it moved to the development of ideas. Lately it has become what architecture should be, which is more fluid organization. There has not been so much 'a change' but 'a development'.

Good education is so important. We do need to look at the way people are taught. It not just about qualifications to get a job. It's about being educated.

I've always been interested in combining architecture with a social agenda, and I really think you can invest and be inventive with hospitals and housing.

It's not my duty as an architect to look at it.

The idea for a building or an object can come up just as quick, but there is a big difference in process.

I don't think that architecture is only about shelter, is only about a very simple enclosure. It should be able to excite you, to calm you, to make you think.

I think about architecture all the time. That's the problem. But I've always been like that. I dream it sometimes.

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

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

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.

I don't think people should do things because you know, 'I am turning this age, I must go have a husband.' If you find somebody and it works out then have kids, it's very nice. But if you don't, you don't.

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.