Rem Koolhaas famous quotes

The good is not a category that interests me.
-- Rem Koolhaas

#Design #Categories #Interest

Not many architects have the luxury to reject significant things.
-- Rem Koolhaas

#Luxury #Architecture #Significant

The stronger the identity, the more it imprisons, the more it resists expansion, interpretation, renewal, contradiction.
-- Rem Koolhaas

#Stronger #Identity #Expansion

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.
-- Rem Koolhaas

#Years #Culture #Four

In this branch of utopian real estate, architecture is no longer the art of designing buildings so much as the brutal skyward extrusion of whatever site the developer has managed to assemble.
-- Rem Koolhaas

#Art #Real #Design

Japan lives with drastic segregation between the sublime, the ugly, and the utterly without qualities. Dominance of the last 2 categories makes mere presence of the first stunning: when beauty 'happens', it is absolutely surprising.
-- Rem Koolhaas

#Japan #Sublime #Quality

A building has at least two lives - the one imagined by its maker and the life it lives afterward - and they are never the same.
-- Rem Koolhaas

#Two #Building #Makers

Our office acts like a kind of educational establishment and we are very careful who we educate.
-- Rem Koolhaas

#Education #Office #Kind

I think one of the important evolutions is that we no longer feel compulsively the need to argue, or to justify things on a kind of rational level. We are much more willing to admit that certain things are completely instinctive and others are really intellectual.
-- Rem Koolhaas

#Thinking #Intellectual #Important

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.
-- Rem Koolhaas

#Cities #Quality #Identity

When shopping was still connected to the street it was also an intensification and articulation of the street. Now it has become utterly independent - contained, controlled, surveyed.
-- Rem Koolhaas

#Independent #Shopping #Articulation

But now sustainability is such a political category that it's getting more and more difficult to think about it in a serious way. Sustainability has become an ornament.
-- Rem Koolhaas

#Thinking #Political #Ornaments

It is not possible to live in this age if you don't have a sense of many contradictory forces.
-- Rem Koolhaas

#Age #Force #Contradictory

Manhattan has generated a shameless architecture that has been loved in direct proportion to its defiant lack of self-hatred, hasbeen respected exactly to the degree that it went too far.
-- Rem Koolhaas

#Self #Hatred #Manhattan

The Grid makes the history of architecture and all previous lessons of urbanism irrelevant. It forces Manhattan's builders to develop a new system of formal values, to invent strategies for the distinction of one block from another. The Grid's two-dimensional discipline also creates undreamt-of freedom for three-dimensional anarchy. The Grid defines a new balance between control and de-control in which the city can be at the same time ordered and fluid, a metropolis of rigid chaos.
-- Rem Koolhaas

#Block #Cities #Two

The Metropolis strives to reach a mythical point where the world is completely fabricated by man, so that it absolutely coincides with his desires.
-- Rem Koolhaas

#Men #Desire #World

The great problem of the concert hall is that the shoebox is the ideal shape for acoustics but that no architect worth their names wants to build a shoebox.
-- Rem Koolhaas

#Names #Shapes #Want

There is no plateau of resting or stabilising. Once you are interested in how things evolve, you have a kind of never-ending perspective, because it means you are interested in articulating the evolution, and therefore the potential change, the potential redefinition.
-- Rem Koolhaas

#Mean #Perspective #Kind

In the end, there will be little else for us to do but shop.
-- Rem Koolhaas

#Littles #Ends #Shops

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.
-- Rem Koolhaas

#Thinking #People #Architecture

Designs are increasingly winning competitions because they are literally green, and because somewhere they feature a small windmill.
-- Rem Koolhaas

#Winning #Umpires #Design

Journalists seem mostly interested in what brand of shoes I wear.
-- Rem Koolhaas

#Shoes #Journalist #Brands

Asia is still dominated by skyscrapers. I hope that, in European cities, it will become a declining trend. They were almost never necessary.
-- Rem Koolhaas

#Cities #Asia #Trends

Infrastructure is much more important than architecture.
-- Rem Koolhaas

#Important #Architecture #Infrastructure

Architecture is a rare collective profession: it's always exercised by groups. There is an essential modesty, which is a complete contradiction to the notion of a star.
-- Rem Koolhaas

#Stars #Groups #Essentials

Architects work in two ways. One is to respond precisely to a client's needs or demands. Another is to look at what the client asks and reinterpret it.
-- Rem Koolhaas

#Two #Demand #Way

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.
-- Rem Koolhaas

#Hands #Feelings #Architect

Miami Beach is a completely interesting hybrid because it is, on the one hand, a resort and, on the other hand, a real city. This condition of city and water on two sides I think is really amazing. And in the heart of that city, it has put an enormous convention center, an enormous physical presence.
-- Rem Koolhaas

#Beach #Real #Heart

The word 'celebrity' and the word 'architect' are basically incompatible.
-- Rem Koolhaas

#Architect

There's nothing Dutch about my architecture.
-- Rem Koolhaas

#Dutch #Architecture

What is now called 'green architecture' is an opportunistic caricature of a much deeper consideration of the issues related to sustainability that architecture has been engaged with for many years. It was one of the first professions that was deeply concerned with these issues and that had an intellectual response to them.
-- Rem Koolhaas

#Years #Issues #Intellectual

Nobody should be anything, but because I once had a different profession and I'm interested in writing, I took it upon me.
-- Rem Koolhaas

#Writing #Different #Should

Sustainability has become an ornament.
-- Rem Koolhaas

#Ornaments #Sustainability

That has been my entire life story. Running against the current and running with the current. Sometimes running with the current is underestimated. The acceptance of certain realities doesn’t preclude idealism. It can lead to certain breakthroughs.
-- Rem Koolhaas

#Running #Acceptance #Reality

Manhattanism is the one urbanistic ideology that has fed, from its conception, on the splendors and miseries of the metropolitan condition—hyper-density—without once losing faith in it as the basis for a desirable modern culture. Manhattan's architecture is a paradigm for the exploitation of congestion.
-- Rem Koolhaas

#Culture #Manhattan #Splendor

If you have this reputation you can sit back and endure it, or you can try to do things with it.
-- Rem Koolhaas

#Trying #Reputation #Endure

Find optimism in the inevitable
-- Rem Koolhaas

#Optimism #Inevitable

Each building has to be beautiful, but cheap and fast, but it lasts forever. That is already an incredible battery of seemingly contradictory demands. So yes, I'm definitely perhaps contradictory person, but I operate in very contradictory times.
-- Rem Koolhaas

#Beautiful #Forever #Batteries

The City is an addictive machine from which there is no escape
-- Rem Koolhaas

#Cities #Machines

The acceptance of certain realities doesn't preclude idealism. It can lead to certain breakthroughs.
-- Rem Koolhaas

#Acceptance #Reality #Certain

I'd say that my profession ends where architectural thinking ends - architectural thinking in terms of thinking about programs and organizational structure. These abstractions play a role in many other disciplines, and those disciplines are now defining their 'architectures' as well.
-- Rem Koolhaas

#Thinking #Play #Discipline

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.
-- Rem Koolhaas

#Thinking #Las Vegas #Junk

The thing is that I have a really intense, almost compulsive need to record. But it doesn't end there, because what I record is somehow transformed into a creative thing. There is a continuity. Recording is the beginning of a conceptual production. I am somehow collapsing the two - recording and producing - into a single event.
-- Rem Koolhaas

#Two #Creative #Needs

Prada is extremely directed in terms of communicating what they like and what they don't like. That is actually extremely pleasant because it clarifies very easily what you can do and what you need to do.
-- Rem Koolhaas

#Needs #Prada #Term

Manhattan is an accumulation of possible disasters that never happen.
-- Rem Koolhaas

#Manhattan #Disaster #Accumulation

The work in S, M, L, XL was almost suicidal. It required so much effort that our office almost went bankrupt.
-- Rem Koolhaas

#Suicide #Suicidal #Office

The luxury of our position now is that we can almost assemble any team to address any issue.
-- Rem Koolhaas

#Team #Luxury #Issues

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.
-- Rem Koolhaas

#Thinking #Hands #Ties

When air conditioning, escalators, and advertising appeared, shopping expanded its scale, but also limited its spontaneity. And it became much more predictable, almost scientific. What had once been the most surprising became the most manipulated.
-- Rem Koolhaas

#Air #Shopping #Advertising

I am incredibly bad at predicting the future; I am only smart enough to observe the present and listen to my intuition about tendencies.
-- Rem Koolhaas

#Smart #Intuition #Enough

I wanted to disconnect from contemporary architecture
-- Rem Koolhaas

#Architecture #Wanted #Contemporary

As more and more architecture is finally unmasked as the mere organization of flow—shopping centers, airports—it is evident that circulation is what makes or breaks public architecture....
-- Rem Koolhaas

#Shopping #Organization #Airports

Without a tighter union, Europe will disintegrate
-- Rem Koolhaas

#Europe #Unions

Architecture is a dangerous mix of power and importance.
-- Rem Koolhaas

#Bad Ass #Architecture #Importance

We live in an almost perfect stillness and work with incredible urgency.
-- Rem Koolhaas

#Perfect #Incredibles #Stillness

Escape from the architecture ghetto is one of the major drivers and has been from the very beginning.
-- Rem Koolhaas

#Ghetto #Architecture #Drivers

The areas of consensus shift unbelievably fast; the bubbles of certainty are constantly exploding.
-- Rem Koolhaas

#Certainty #Consensus #Exploding

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.
-- Rem Koolhaas

#Omnipotence #Definitions #Mixtures