Welcome to our collection of quotes by Zaha Hadid. We hope you enjoy pondering them and please share widely.
Wikipedia Summary for Zaha Hadid
Dame Zaha Mohammad Hadid (Arabic: زها حديد Zahā Ḥadīd; 31 October 1950 – 31 March 2016) was a Iraqi architect, artist and designer, recognised as a major figure in architecture of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Born in Baghdad, Iraq, Hadid studied mathematics as an undergraduate and then enrolled at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in 1972. In search of an alternative system to traditional architectural drawing, and influenced by Suprematism and the Russian avant-garde, Hadid adopted painting as a design tool and abstraction as an investigative principle to "reinvestigate the aborted and untested experiments of Modernism [...] to unveil new fields of building."She was described by The Guardian as the "Queen of the curve", who "liberated architectural geometry, giving it a whole new expressive identity". Her major works include the London Aquatics Centre for the 2012 Olympics, the Broad Art Museum, Rome's MAXXI Museum, and the Guangzhou Opera House. Some of her awards have been presented posthumously, including the statuette for the 2017 Brit Awards. Several of her buildings were still under construction at the time of her death, including the Daxing International Airport in Beijing, and the Al Wakrah Stadium in Qatar, a venue for the 2022 FIFA World Cup.
Hadid was the first woman to receive the Pritzker Architecture Prize, in 2004. She received the UK's most prestigious architectural award, the Stirling Prize, in 2010 and 2011. In 2012, she was made a Dame by Elizabeth II for services to architecture, and in February, 2016, the month preceding her death, she became the first woman to be individually awarded the Royal Gold Medal from the Royal Institute of British Architects (Ray Eames and Sheila O'Donnell had previously been awarded it jointly with Charles Eames and John Tuomey respectively).
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.
Yes, I'm a feminist, because I see all women as smart, gifted, and tough.
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 find industrial cities exciting. I like their toughness.
I don't particularly like showing furniture on pedestals, but for whatever reasons you always have to in museums.
My friendships are very important to me.
Obviously for some people there is a big connection between music and the way you can create a space.
My father was a socialist, so he would have thought that I shouldn't be a dame.
Being Iraqi taught me to be very cautious.
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.
As a woman, you're not accessible to every world.
A brilliant design will always benefit from the input of others.
Too many are too obsessed by method. it becomes a dogma.
Architecture is like writing. You have to edit it over and over so it looks effortless.
For a woman to go out alone into architecture is still very, very hard. It's still a man's world.
Indeed, our designs become more ambitious as we see the new possibilities created by the technology of other industries.
It's not my duty as an architect to look at it.
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.
Life in the Middle East is quite different from other places.
My buildings are not particularly expensive. It is not a tin shed. If you want a tinny car, you pay for that.
I am quite sensitive to politics, because you know, as an Arab, an Iraqi, all your life, you are very conscious of it.
I'm a pushover. I make allowances for people if I like them.
All the privileged can travel, see different worlds, not everyone can. I think it is important for people to have an interesting locale nearby.
The conservative values that are emerging, it may not effect architecture immediately but it will effect society and that's what worries me.
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.
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.
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.
There are so many great galleries and museums in London, but they can be very crowded during the day.
Some people really live and work within the same doctrine, the same diagram with the same logic.
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.
You have to really believe not only in yourself; you have to believe that the world is actually worth your sacrifices.
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.
The beauty of the landscape -- where sand, water, reeds, birds, buildings, and people all somehow flowed together -- has never left me.
Yes, I'm a feminist, because I see all women as smart, gifted and tough.
It would be very interesting to design objects for everyday life, something where the ideas that are expressed can be launched into society.
I think that in life you don't need too much; you need friends, you need to do what you like doing.
The funkiest housing in Holland is for low-income, and I think that's very nice.
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.
The current state of architecture and design requires extensive collaboration and an investigative attitude and we continue to research and develop new technologies.
No. I don't have the patience, and I'm not very tactful. People say I can be frightening.
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.
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.
I really love Miami, but I don't think the architecture matches the city. It's a bit too commercial.
The spirit of adventure to embrace the new and the incredible belief in the power of invention attracted me to the Russian avant-garde.
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 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.
My generation were all careerists.
Men think a woman should not have an opinion.
What's similar between Britain and America is the lack of good-quality civic buildings.
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.
It's very important that historic cities are allowed to reinvent their future.
Architecture is unnecessarily difficult. It's very tough.
When I first came to Guangzhou in 1981, it seemed such a hard and dour place with everyone in Chairman Mao uniforms.
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.
In hospital, people should be able to have time to themselves.
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?
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.
I love driving around east London -- it's always full of surprises. Actually, I don't drive myself -- I like to be driven.
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 equally proud of all of my architectural projects. It's always rewarding to see an ambitious design become reality.
Half of architecture students are women, and you see respected, established female architects all the time.
People say I design architectural icons. If I design a building and it becomes an icon, that's ok.
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.
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.
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.'
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.
When I taught, all my best students were women.
I really believe in the idea of the future.
I'm into fashion because it contains the mood of the day, of the moment -- like music, literature, and art.
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.
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.
Would they call me a diva if I were a guy?
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.
Education, housing and hospitals are the most important things for society.
I think about architecture all the time. That's the problem. But I've always been like that. I dream it sometimes.
I am sure that as a woman I can do a very good skyscraper.
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.
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.
What's nice about concrete is that it looks unfinished.
I always thought I was powerful, since I was a kid.
I will never give myself the luxury of thinking, 'I've made it.'
Architecture is how the person places herself in the space. Fashion is about how you place the object on the person.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Like men, women have to be diligent and work hard.
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.