Rem Koolhaas Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
More Rem Koolhaas quote about:
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“The good is not a category that interests me.”
-- Rem Koolhaas -
“Not many architects have the luxury to reject significant things.”
-- Rem Koolhaas -
“The stronger the identity, the more it imprisons, the more it resists expansion, interpretation, renewal, contradiction.”
-- Rem Koolhaas -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“Our office acts like a kind of educational establishment and we are very careful who we educate.”
-- Rem Koolhaas -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“It is not possible to live in this age if you don't have a sense of many contradictory forces.”
-- Rem Koolhaas -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“In the end, there will be little else for us to do but shop.”
-- Rem Koolhaas -
“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 -
“Designs are increasingly winning competitions because they are literally green, and because somewhere they feature a small windmill.”
-- Rem Koolhaas -
“Journalists seem mostly interested in what brand of shoes I wear.”
-- Rem Koolhaas -
“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 -
“Infrastructure is much more important than architecture.”
-- Rem Koolhaas -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“The word 'celebrity' and the word 'architect' are basically incompatible.”
-- Rem Koolhaas -
“There's nothing Dutch about my architecture.”
-- Rem Koolhaas
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