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.
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.
Half of architecture students are women, and you see respected, established female architects all the time.
I think about architecture all the time. That's the problem. But I've always been like that. I dream it sometimes.
What's similar between Britain and America is the lack of good-quality civic buildings.
I will never give myself the luxury of thinking, 'I've made it.'
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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 am equally proud of all of my architectural projects. It's always rewarding to see an ambitious design become reality.
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.
I really love Miami, but I don't think the architecture matches the city. It's a bit too commercial.
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.
Some of the things we said looked worse than we meant them
