Top 60 Zaha Hadid Quotes

Life in the Middle East is quite different from other 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

I find industrial cities exciting. I like their toughness.

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 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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Architecture is unnecessarily difficult. It’s very tough.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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 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?

I really believe in the idea of the future.

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

Being Iraqi taught me to be very cautious.

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 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.

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

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

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

My friendships are very important to me.

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.

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

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.