Zaha Hadid Quotes

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

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.

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.

You have to really believe not only in yourself;

you have to believe that the world is actually worth your sacrifices.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

My work first engaged with the early russian avant-garde;

the paintings of moholy-nagy, el lissitzky's 'prouns' and naum gabo's sculptures, but in particular with the work of kasimir malevitch - he was an early influence for me as a representative of the modern avant-garde intersection between art and design.

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.

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

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

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 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 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.

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.

It would be very interesting to design objects for everyday life, something where the ideas that are expressed can be launched into society.

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'.

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.

The current state of architecture and design requires extensive collaboration and an investigative attitude and we continue to research and develop new technologies.

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

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.

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.

When I taught, all my best students were women.

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

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

One has to strive for a very open liberal society.

A brilliant design will always benefit from the input of others.

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.

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

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

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.

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 use the computer. I do sketches, very quickly, often more than 100 on the same formal research.

Know what it is that you are trying to find out.

There are 360 degrees, so why stick to one?

In terms of form, all the projects interest me equally, although there are obviously large differences according to the scale and process of each project.

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

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

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.

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.

Different projects give you satisfaction in different ways.

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

The world is looking more and more segmented, the difference between people is becoming greater.