Quotes by Women Architects

Zaha Hadid

Farah Pahlavi

Maya Lin

Beatrix Farrand

Norma Merrick Sklarek

The art of decoration requires the most sophisticated and self-indulgent skills. Its aim has always been to sate the senses as gloriously as possible.... ornament is not only a source of sensuous pleasure; it supplies a necessary kind of magic to people and places that lack it. More than just a dread of empty spaces has led to the urge to decorate; it is the fear of empty selves.

Ada Louise Huxtable

Women overwhelmingly carry the load of the economic chaos and social misery caused by the present money system everywhere in the world.

Margrit Kennedy

I came and knelt at the king's feet, and when he put the crown on my head, I felt that he had just honoured all the women of Iran. Only four years earlier we had been in the same category of the mentally handicapped: we did not even have the basic right of choosing our representatives. The crown wiped out centuries of humiliation; more surely than any law, it solemnly affirmed the equality of men and women.

I am non-European, I don't do conventional work and I am a woman. On the one hand all of these things together make it easier — but on the other hand it is very difficult.

Over the years, it has slowly dawned on me that the people who cause my painful experiences are ignorant and crude. They are the critics who have not read enough and the clients who do not know why they have come to us. I have been helped to realise this by noticing that the scholars whose work we most respect, the clients whose projects intrigue us, and the patrons whose friendship inspires us, have no problem understanding my role. They are the sophisticates. Partly through them I gain heart and realise that, over the last twenty years, I have managed to do my work and, despite some sliding, to achieve my own self-respect.

Denise Scott Brown

A Not So Big House feels more spacious than many of its oversized neighbors because it is space with substance, all of it in use every day.

I do not think you can find a reason for everything you make.

No life is well-rounded without the subtle inspiration of beauty.

Beatrix Farrand

The conscious principle in this design has been to achieve forms that could create experiences, and that could at the same time welcome everyone's experiences with the serenity of an effortless development.

Architecture should be working on improving the environment of people in their homes, in their places of work and their places of recreation. It should be functional and pleasant, not just in the image of the architect's ego.

Norma Merrick Sklarek