Rem Koolhaas Quotes
-
We live in an almost perfect stillness and work with incredible urgency.
→ -
As an architect, I always have mixed feelings. On the one hand, your fingers are itching. As a human being, you are happy to participate in the indolence.
→ -
If you have this reputation you can sit back and endure it, or you can try to do things with it.
→ -
Architecture is a hazardous mixture of omnipotence and impotence. It is by definition a c h a o t i c a d v e n t u r e... In other words, the utopian enterprise.
→ -
Sustainability has become an ornament.
→ -
Our office acts like a kind of educational establishment and we are very careful who we educate.
→ -
The luxury of our position now is that we can almost assemble any team to address any issue.
→ -
When we went in the late 1990s, Nigeria was still in a dictatorship. So we didn't go with a mission. It started really with a sort of blankness and open-endedness.
→ -
The Metropolis strives to reach a mythical point where the world is completely fabricated by man, so that it absolutely coincides with his desires.
→ -
Our society can no longer tolerate ugliness. You see that in cars, sofas and women. [But] ugliness also has a right to exist.
→ -
Most old cities are now sclerotic machines that dispense known qualities in ever-greater quantities, instead of laboratories of the uncertain. Only the skyscraper offers business the wide-open spaces of a man-made Wild West, a frontier in the sky.
→ -
We know that Las Vegas is junk, but at the same time I think that exactly the same process and ultimately also, perhaps the same logic, attaches itself to or underlies our masterpieces. We live in an amazing era when in spite of an absence of masters there is an explosion of masterpieces.
→ -
We say we want to create beauty, identity, quality, singularity. And yet, maybe in truth these cities that we have are desired. Maybe their very characterlessness provides the best context for living.
→ -
Manhattan has no choice but the skyward extrusion of the Grid itself; only the Skyscraper offers business the wide-open spaces of a man-made Wild West, a frontier in the sky.
→ -
There are essentially two possibilities. One is to be, shall we say, an average architect and do the same thing everywhere. The other is to let yourself be inspired and even changed by the unique qualities of the place where you're building. We always try to take the second approach.
→ -
Any architectural project we do takes at least four or five years, so increasingly there is a discrepancy between the acceleration of culture and the continuing slowness of architecture.
→ -
Asia is still dominated by skyscrapers. I hope that, in European cities, it will become a declining trend. They were almost never necessary.
→ -
People can inhabit anything. And they can be miserable in anything and ecstatic in anything. More and more I think that architecture has nothing to do with it. Of course, that's both liberating and alarming.
→ -
I am incredibly bad at predicting the future; I am only smart enough to observe the present and listen to my intuition about tendencies.
→ -
Lagos was not very inviting even to Lagosians. It was considered a no-go zone, almost in its entirety.
→ -
The people from the suburbs are bringing along their suburban values: cleanliness, orderliness, safety - dullness, in other words. As a result, urban areas are being hollowed out. Just look at Times Square in New York. No more sex shops, no drugs, no homeless people. The area is clinically clean and incredibly dull.
→ -
Talk about beauty and you get boring answers, but talk about ugliness and things get interesting.
→ -
One cannot completely avoid this landmark character with large buildings such as these. But the city itself is also gigantic.
→ -
Manhattan has generated a shameless architecture that has been loved in direct proportion to its defiant lack of self-hatred, has been respected exactly to the degree that it went too far.
→ -
Influence is a very unpleasant subject and I deal with it in a maybe irresponsible way, which is to really ignore it. It would be a nightmare if we started to really think about it; it would tie our hands, it would tie everyone elses hands.
→ -
Let's put it this way: One can be happy or unhappy in a building. But some buildings make us more depressed than others.
→ -
I studied in London in 1968. Our school had a separate department of tropical architecture. Of course it was totally unfashionable, partly because nobody wanted to think about colonialism, but basically what you learned there was that, OK, the sun is here, so you should create natural ventilation here - an unbelievable amount of really sound principles that have been completely abandoned, so now everything is air conditioned with big machines.
→ -
The beauty of my profession [architecture] lies in its randomness and surprise. And don't think I can choose my projects. I have to build what's offered to me.
→ -
The institutions are working better now, the banks are much more functional. At this time, 1997, there were no mobile phones! It's a whole different thing now with mobile phones: technology has created a form of regulation, because people can actually talk to each other a lot more.
→ -
I wanted to disconnect from contemporary architecture
→
Related Authors
-
Jean Nouvel Architect -
Peter Zumthor Architect -
Renzo Piano Architect -
Daniel Libeskind Architect -
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe Architect -
Zaha Hadid Architect -
Cecil Balmond Designer -
Norman Foster Architect -
Toyo Ito Architect -
Joshua Prince-Ramus Architect -
Frank Gehry Architect -
Richard Meier Architect -
Santiago Calatrava Architect -
Steven Holl Architect -
Bruce Mau Designer -
Le Corbusier Architect -
Alvaro Siza Vieira Architect -
Tadao Ando Architect -
Peter Eisenman Architect
Popular Topics
- Painting A Picture
- Your Dreams And Goals
- Through Thick And Thin
- Brainwashing
- Range Rover
- Historical Political
- Numerals
- You Left Me
- Romantic Friendship
- Impermanence
- Golf Course
- Seen And Unseen
- Inspectors
- Solaris
- Fall Out Boy
- Endless War
- Disabled Children
- Baseball Pitching
- Light Of The World
- Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words