Zaha Hadid famous quotes

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

#Funny Inspirational #Believe #Sacrifice

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

#Appreciated #Proportion #Dare

There are 360 degrees, so why stick to one?
-- Zaha Hadid

#Sticks #Degrees #Architect

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.
-- Zaha Hadid

#Simple #Thinking #Make You Think

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

#Smart #Inspiration #Feminist

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.
-- Zaha Hadid

#Thinking #Cities #Rivers

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

#Reality #Design #Ambitious

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.
-- Zaha Hadid

#Girl #Guy #Mind

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.
-- Zaha Hadid

#Block #Believe #Museums

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

#Icons #People #Design

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.
-- Zaha Hadid

#Nice #Design #Quality

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

#Museums #Furniture #Pedestal

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.
-- Zaha Hadid

#Art #White #Kind

I am eccentric, I admit it, but I am not a nutcase.
-- Zaha Hadid

#Eccentric

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.
-- Zaha Hadid

#Inspirational #Goal #Want

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

#Fashion #Space #Architecture

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

#Important #Housing

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.
-- Zaha Hadid

#Thinking #People #Way

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

#Writing #Looks #Architecture

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

#Thinking #Interesting #People

Architecture is unnecessarily difficult. It's very tough.
-- Zaha Hadid

#Architecture #Tough #Difficult

I find industrial cities exciting. I like their toughness.
-- Zaha Hadid

#Cities #Exciting #Toughness

Being Iraqi taught me to be very cautious.
-- Zaha Hadid

#Taught #Cautious

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.
-- Zaha Hadid

#Mean #America #Interviews

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

#World

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

#Father #Party #Leader

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

#Sensitive #Conscious

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

#London #East #Driving

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.
-- Zaha Hadid

#Growing Up #Iraq #Optimism

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.
-- Zaha Hadid

#Hate #Men #Views

When I taught, all my best students were women.
-- Zaha Hadid

#Taught #Students

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.
-- Zaha Hadid

#Winning #People #Competition

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.
-- Zaha Hadid

#Men #Thinking #Long

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

#Looks #Architecture #Architect

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.
-- Zaha Hadid

#Success #Talking #Shoes

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

#Art #Way #Architecture

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

#Water #People #Bird

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

#Men #World #Architecture

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.
-- Zaha Hadid

#School #Thinking #Hands

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

#People #Able #Should

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.
-- Zaha Hadid

#Husband #Nice #Kids

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

#Space #People #Way

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

#Country #Hip Hop #Hips

I really believe in the idea of the future.
-- Zaha Hadid

#Believe #Ideas

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

#Teaching #People #Frightening

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.
-- Zaha Hadid

#Jewels #Cities #Trying

Would they call me a diva if I were a guy?
-- Zaha Hadid

#Guy #Call Me

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.'
-- Zaha Hadid

#Office #Focus #Used

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

#Children #Kids #Thinking

I think about architecture all the time. That's the problem. But I've always been like that. I dream it sometimes.
-- Zaha Hadid

#Dream #Thinking #Architecture

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.
-- Zaha Hadid

#Regret #Two #Done

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.
-- Zaha Hadid

#War #Men #Iran

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

#East #Middle East #Different

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

#Museums #London #Gallery

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

#America #Quality #Building

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

#Uniforms #Firsts #Mao

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.
-- Zaha Hadid

#Fashion #Kids #London

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
-- Zaha Hadid

#Today #Architecture #Building

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.
-- Zaha Hadid

#Bad Ass #Thinking #Hands

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.
-- Zaha Hadid

#Crazy #Mean #Sleep

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.
-- Zaha Hadid

#Depression #Depressing #Decision

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.
-- Zaha Hadid

#Beach #Perfect #World

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.
-- Zaha Hadid

#Thinking #Ideas #Design

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.
-- Zaha Hadid

#Nice #Thinking #Cities

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.
-- Zaha Hadid

#Years #Students #Plant

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

#London #Exciting

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

#Thinking #Cities #Miami

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

#Very Good #Skyscraper

I always thought I was powerful, since I was a kid.
-- Zaha Hadid

#Powerful #Kids

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

#Half #Female #Students

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

#School #Decision #Males