Architecture is unnecessarily difficult. It's very tough.
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.
Being Iraqi taught me to be very cautious.
You really have to have a goal.
Education, housing and hospitals are the most important things for society.
I am sure that as a woman I can do a very good skyscraper.
One has to strive for a very open liberal society.
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.
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.
They all come out from the same thing; all the projects are connected somehow.
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.
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.
I don't particularly like showing furniture on pedestals, but for whatever reasons you always have to in museums.
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.
It would be very interesting to design objects for everyday life, something where the ideas that are expressed can be launched into society.
As a woman you're not accessible to every world.
Some people really live and work within the same doctrine, the same diagram with the same logic.
There is a strong reciprocal relationship whereby our more ambitious design visions encourage the continuing development of the new digital technologies and fabrication techniques, and those new developments in turn inspire us to push the design envelope ever further.
All the privileged can travel, see different worlds, not everyone can. I think it is important for people to have an interesting locale nearby.
My earliest memory of architecture, I was perhaps 6 or 7 years old, was of my aunt building a house in mosul in the north of iraq. The architect was a close friend of my father's and he used to come to our house with the drawings and models. I remember seeing the model in our living room and I think it triggered something, as I was completely intrigued by it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The conservative values that are emerging, it may not effect architecture immediately but it will effect society and that's what worries me.
