Top 130 Quotes & Sayings by Zaha Hadid
Explore popular quotes and sayings by a British architect Zaha Hadid.
Last updated on November 3, 2024.
My father was a socialist, so he would have thought that I shouldn't be a dame.
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 always thought I was powerful, since I was a kid.
I really love Miami, but I don't think the architecture matches the city. It's a bit too commercial.
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 am equally proud of all of my architectural projects. It's always rewarding to see an ambitious design become reality.
I have always appreciated those who dare to experiment with materials and proportions.
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.
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.
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.
As a woman, you're not accessible to every world.
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.
My friendships are very important to me.
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.
When I taught, all my best students were women.
Would they call me a diva if I were a guy?
There are so many great galleries and museums in London, but they can be very crowded during the day.
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.
Education, housing and hospitals are the most important things for 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 loved London. In the 1970s... it was very exciting, really wild.
I am sure that as a woman I can do a very good skyscraper.
Architecture is unnecessarily difficult. It's very 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.
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 will never give myself the luxury of thinking, 'I've made it.'
I'm into fashion because it contains the mood of the day, of the moment - like music, literature, and art.
What's similar between Britain and America is the lack of good-quality civic buildings.
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.
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 am quite sensitive to politics, because you know, as an Arab, an Iraqi, all your life, you are very conscious of it.
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 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.
Obviously for some people there is a big connection between music and the way you can create a space.
When I first came to Guangzhou in 1981, it seemed such a hard and dour place with everyone in Chairman Mao uniforms.
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'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.
It's very important that historic cities are allowed to reinvent their future.
I'm a pushover. I make allowances for people if I like them.
The funkiest housing in Holland is for low-income, and I think that's very nice.
In hospital, people should be able to have time to themselves.
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.
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.
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 love driving around east London - it's always full of surprises. Actually, I don't drive myself - I like to be driven.
I like music. Country, hip-hop, R&B, sometimes classical.
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.
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.
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.
My buildings are not particularly expensive. It is not a tin shed. If you want a tinny car, you pay for that.
All the privileged can travel, see different worlds; not everyone can. I think it is important for people to have an interesting locale nearby.
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.
Architecture is how the person places herself in the space. Fashion is about how you place the object on the person.
Like men, women have to be diligent and work hard.
I really believe in the idea of the future.
Being Iraqi taught me to be very cautious.
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