Top 130 Quotes & Sayings by Zaha Hadid - Page 2

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

My generation were all careerists.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

Men think a woman should not have an opinion.

The conservative values that are emerging, it may not effect architecture immediately but it will effect society and that's what worries me.

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

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

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.

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 intention is to really carve out of a city civic spaces and the more it is accessible to a much larger mass in public and it's about people enjoying that space. That makes life that much better. If you think about housing, education, whether schools and hospitals, these are all very interesting projects because in the way you interpret this special experience.

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.

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

I don't like the masculine style, jeans. I like issey miyake... and black dresses.

I don't use the computer. I do sketches, very quickly, often more than 100 on the same formal research.

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.

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.

There are 360 degrees, so why stick to one?

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.

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.

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

Different projects give you satisfaction in different ways.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

The idea for a building or an object can come up just as quick, but there is a big difference in process.

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

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.

With products the form is almost the finished piece, but with architecture it is not.

You have to be very focused and work very hard, but it is not about working hard without knowing what your aim is!

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

They all come out from the same thing; all the projects are connected somehow.

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.

Too many are too obsessed by method. it becomes a dogma.

The goal posts might shift, but you should have a goal.

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

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.

One has to strive for a very open liberal society.

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

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'.

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

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.

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

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.

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