Zaha Hadid Quotes

#1. Life in the Middle East is quite different from other places.

Zaha Hadid

#2. 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.

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#3. You don't always have to show art in what's called a white box; you can have a kind of complexity within an exhibit which actually respects the art as well.

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

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#5. My buildings are not particularly expensive. It is not a tin shed. If you want a tinny car, you pay for that.

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#6. I love driving around east London - it's always full of surprises. Actually, I don't drive myself - I like to be driven.

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

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#8. If I wanted to do clothes or if I wanted to make a building or design a choreography, you are able to do that - they are all under a similar kind of design umbrella.

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#9. 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.

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#10. People in power, they're so used to people kind of playing up to them.

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#11. 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.

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#12. 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.

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#13. 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.

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#14. You have to really believe not only in yourself; you have to believe that the world is actually worth your sacrifices.

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

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#16. 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.

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#17. 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.

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#18. The paintings have only ever been ways of exploring architecture. I don't see them as art.

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#19. Architecture is how the person places herself in the space. Fashion is about how you place the object on the person.

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#20. I am quite sensitive to politics, because you know, as an Arab, an Iraqi, all your life, you are very conscious of it.

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

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#22. I'm a pushover. I make allowances for people if I like them.

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#23. I find industrial cities exciting. I like their toughness.

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#24. I don't think I am that tough, actually. Well, tough in the sense that I don't take any rubbish, and that doesn't make me very popular, frankly. I mean, because some people say something to me, and I just tell them off. I mean, why should I put up with it?

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#25. It's very important for cities all around the world to reinvent themselves, and Glasgow is a good example of that. The Scots are very nice. I don't think they are burdened by their history.

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#26. No. I don't have the patience, and I'm not very tactful. People say I can be frightening.

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#27. The funkiest housing in Holland is for low-income, and I think that's very nice.

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#28. 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.

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

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#30. What's nice about concrete is that it looks unfinished.

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#31. I loved London. In the 1970s ... it was very exciting, really wild.

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#32. I have always appreciated designers who dare to reinterpret fabrics and proportions, so I follow the Japanese and Belgian designers. The pieces are so animated. When they lie still, they are one thing, but once you stand them up or wear them, they become something else.

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#33. Being Iraqi taught me to be very cautious.

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#34. Yes, I'm a feminist, because I see all women as smart, gifted and tough.

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

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#36. My father was a socialist, so he would have thought that I shouldn't be a dame.

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#37. 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

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#38. When I taught, all my best students were women.

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#39. When women do succeed, the press, even the industry press, spend far too much time talking about how we dress, what shoes we're wearing, who we're meant to be seeing. That's pretty sad for women, especially when it's written by women who really should know better.

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

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#41. I'm into fashion because it contains the mood of the day, of the moment - like music, literature, and art.

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#42. Education, housing and hospitals are the most important things for society.

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#43. 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.

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#44. Society has not been set up in a way that allows women to go back to work after taking time off. Many women now have to work as well as do everything at home and no one can do everything. Society needs to find a way of relieving women.

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

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

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#47. Obviously for some people there is a big connection between music and the way you can create a space.

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#48. 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.

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#49. I can't focus when there's too many things around. Whenever I used to go to the office, I used to always say, 'Tidy up.'

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#50. I really believe in the idea of the future.

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#51. You really have to have a goal. The goal posts might shift, but you should have a goal. Know what it is you want to find out.

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#52. In hospital, people should be able to have time to themselves.

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

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#54. I am eccentric, I admit it, but I am not a nutcase.

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#55. I think that the training of architects allows you to see what will happen ten years ahead of time, or twenty. It's not guessing, it's not intuitive, it's based on research - and we may be wrong.

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#56. What's similar between Britain and America is the lack of good-quality civic buildings.

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#57. 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.

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#58. I like music. Country, hip-hop, R&B, sometimes classical.

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#59. For a woman to go out alone into architecture is still very, very hard. It's still a man's world.

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#60. The beauty of the landscape - where sand, water, reeds, birds, buildings, and people all somehow flowed together - has never left me.

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#61. Of course I believe imaginative architecture can make a difference to people's lives, but I wish it was possible to divert some of the effort we put into ambitious museums and galleries into the basic architectural building blocks of society.

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#62. Architecture is unnecessarily difficult. It's very tough.

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#63. There are 360 degrees, so why stick to one?

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#64. Men think a woman should not have an opinion.

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#65. It's very important that historic cities are allowed to reinvent their future.

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#66. My generation were all careerists.

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

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#68. If you think about making a city that is much more porous, many accessible spaces, that is a political position, because you don't fortify, you open it up so that many people can use it.

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#69. I used to not like being called a 'woman architect': I'm an architect, not just a woman architect. Guys used to tap me on the head and say, 'You are okay for a girl.' But I see the incredible amount of need from other women for reassurance that it could be done, so I don't mind that at all.

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#70. 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.

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#71. Wherever I am in the world, my perfect day begins with waking up and heading to the beach or the pool or somewhere I can be semi-comatose. I just wake up and go to the sun.

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

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#73. I always thought I was powerful, since I was a kid.

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#74. I've always thought that design can have equal importance to the idea of internal architecture. Professionally, things can be very dogmatic - you do the architecture, someone else does the interiors, someone else does the furniture, the fabric, etc. But I think design is all-encompassing.

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#75. 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.

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#76. The commission process in America and England is different. In America, they do it through an interview process, and it's really based on whether they like you or not. I mean, it's nothing to do with whether you do the best scheme or the worst scheme.

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

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#78. 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.

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#79. I think that in life you don't need too much; you need friends, you need to do what you like doing.

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#80. 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.

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#81. Of course, my family helped me, my brothers helped me, but after I set up my own office I had to really help myself. Some people seem to think I had an oil well in my garden! It's a nice idea but not true.

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#82. Like men, women have to be diligent and work hard.

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#83. Would they call me a diva if I were a guy?

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#84. I don't think that everybody in the planet should have a child. I've never had the desire I should have a kid.

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

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#86. I was always unusual-looking; I wouldn't say beautiful.

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#87. 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.

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#88. My friendships are very important to me.

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

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#90. 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.

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#91. I think it's good if areas get upgraded and gentrified, as long as the people who always lived there can stay. But they get pushed out to some place.

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

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#93. I am equally proud of all of my architectural projects. It's always rewarding to see an ambitious design become reality.

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#94. I will never give myself the luxury of thinking, 'I've made it.'

Zaha Hadid