Rem Koolhaas Quotes

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.
The work in S, M, L, XL was almost suicidal. It required so much effort that our office almost went bankrupt.
We felt it was very important for an entity like CCTV to make its presence felt... To generate a space and to define a space, that is the main thing.
We live in an almost perfect stillness and work with incredible urgency.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Asia is still dominated by skyscrapers. I hope that, in European cities, it will become a declining trend. They were almost never necessary.
I am incredibly bad at predicting the future; I am only smart enough to observe the present and listen to my intuition about tendencies.
Infrastructure is much more important than architecture.
Journalists seem mostly interested in what brand of shoes I wear.
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.
Nobody should be anything, but because I once had a different profession and I'm interested in writing, I took it upon me.
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.
The word 'celebrity' and the word 'architect' are basically incompatible.
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AuthorName
Rem Koolhaas
Profession
Architect
BirthDate
17 November, 1944
Country
Netherlands
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