Zaha Hadid Quotes

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Complexity, Exhibit

• 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

  Topics in Confidence

  Tags in Competition, Difficult

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Wake Up, Sun

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Nights, Exhausted

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Scheme, Interview

• 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.

  Zaha Hadid

  Topics in Society

  Tags in Needs, Time

• 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.

  Zaha Hadid

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Some People, Helped

• 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

  Topics in Society

  Tags in Museums, Architectural

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Reinvent, Burdened

• 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.

  Zaha Hadid

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Accessible, Open

• 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.

  Zaha Hadid

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Building, Clothes

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Furniture, Dogmatic

• 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.

  Zaha Hadid

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Architect, Reassurance

• 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.

  Zaha Hadid

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Guessing, Intuitive

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Rivers, Flown

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Fashion, Statement

• 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.

  Zaha Hadid

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Appreciated, Fabrics

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Turning

• 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?

  Zaha Hadid

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Frankly, People Say

• 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.

  Zaha Hadid

  Topics in Education

  Tags in Educated, Good

Zaha Hadid (75)

Birth:	31st October, 1950
Nationality:	British
Profession:	Architect

About

Zaha Hadid is an Iraqi-British architect. She received the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 2004 the first woman to do so and the Stirling Prize in 2010 and 2011. Her buildings are distinctively futuristic, characterized by the "powerful, curving forms of her elongated structures" with "multiple perspective points and fragmented geometry to evoke the chaos of modern life". She is currently professor at the University of Applied Arts Vienna in Austria.

Related Authors

• George M. White
• Arne Jacobsen
• Charles Willard Moore
• Marcus V. Pollio
• Adolf Loos
• Ralph Adams Cram
• Giotto di Bondone
• Buckminster Fuller
• Zaha Hadid
• Witold Rybczynski

Advertisement

Today's Anniversary - 3rd December

Births

• 1948 - Ozzy Osbourne
• 1766 - Robert Bloomfield
• 1955 - Warren Jeffs
• 1857 - Joseph Conrad
• 1795 - Rowland Hill

Deaths

• 1962 - Mary Gilmore
• 1919 - Pierre Auguste Renoir
• 1894 - Robert Louis Stevenson
• 1993 - Lewis Thomas
• 1910 - Mary Baker Eddy