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...

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...

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

I find industrial cities exciting. I like their toughness.

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

I love driving around east London – it’s always full of surprises. Actually, I don’t drive myself – I like to be driven.

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...

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

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...

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

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...

It’s very important that historic cities are allowed to reinvent their future.

I’m a pushover. I make allowances for people if I like them.

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.

I will never give myself the luxury of thinking, ‘I’ve made it.’

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 loved London. In the 1970s… it was very exciting, really wild.

As a woman, you’re not accessible to every world.

My buildings are not particularly expensive. It is not a tin shed. If you want a tinny car, you pay for that.

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

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 have always appreciated those who dare to experiment with materials and proportions.

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...

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.

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

My father was a socialist, so he would have thought that I shouldn’t be a dame.

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

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...

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

Architecture is unnecessarily difficult. It’s very tough.

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.

I’m into fashion because it contains the mood of the day, of the moment – like music, literature, and art.

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

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

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....

I really believe in the idea of the future.

My friendships are very important to me.

Men think a woman should not have an opinion.

What’s nice about concrete is that it looks unfinished.

The funkiest housing in Holland is for low-income, and I think that’s very nice.

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.

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.

Would they call me a diva if I were a guy?

People say I design architectural icons. If I design a building and it becomes an icon, that’s ok.

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

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...

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

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.

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...

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