Zaha Hadid Quotations

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

I used to not like being called a 'woman architect.' I'm an architect, not just a woman architect. The guys used to tap me on the head and say 'you're OK for a girl.' But I see an incredible amount of need from other women for reassurance that it can be done, so I don't mind anymore.

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 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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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 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.

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.'

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?

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.

I really believe in the idea of the future.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

Men think a woman should not have an opinion.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

I find industrial cities exciting. I like their toughness.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Being Iraqi taught me to be very cautious.

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

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

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

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

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

When I taught, all my best students were women.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Architecture is unnecessarily difficult. It's very tough.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

I'm trying to discover - invent, I suppose - an architecture, and forms of urban planning, that do something of the same thing in a contemporary way. I started out trying to create buildings that would sparkle like isolated jewels; now I want them to connect, to form a new kind of landscape, to flow together with contemporary cities and the lives of their peoples.

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

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

There are 360 degrees, so why stick to one?

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