Dame Zaha Mohammad Hadid DBE RA (Arabic: زها حديد Zahā Ḥadīd; 31 October 1950 – 31 March 2016) was an Iraqi-British architect.
What's similar between Britain and America is the lack of good-quality civic buildings.
I am equally proud of all of my architectural projects. It's always rewarding to see an ambitious design become reality.
I like music. Country, hip-hop, R&B, sometimes classical.
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.
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'.
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.
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.
It would be very interesting to design objects for everyday life, something where the ideas that are expressed can be launched into society.
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.
The goal posts might shift, but you should have a goal.
Know what it is that you are trying to find out.
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.
The world is looking more and more segmented, the difference between people is becoming greater.
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'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.
In hospital, people should be able to have time to themselves.
Life in the Middle East is quite different from other places.
I am quite sensitive to politics, because you know, as an Arab, an Iraqi, all your life, you are very conscious of it.
Architecture is unnecessarily difficult. It's very tough.
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.