Words matter. These are the best Rem Koolhaas Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Our office acts like a kind of educational establishment and we are very careful who we educate.
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.
The word ‘celebrity’ and the word ‘architect’ are basically incompatible.
One of our theories is that one can offset this excessive compulsion toward the spectacular with a return to simplicity.
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.
If you have this reputation you can sit back and endure it, or you can try to do things with it.
Designs are increasingly winning competitions because they are literally green, and because somewhere they feature a small windmill.
There’s nothing Dutch about my architecture.
The intellectual force of the West is still dominant, but other cultures are getting stronger. I expect that we will develop a new way of thinking in architecture and urban planning, and that less will be based on our models.
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.
It’s a weird city because the uglier the weather, the more beautiful the city. And the uglier the buildings, the more coherent the city.
Not many architects have the luxury to reject significant things.
Escape from the architecture ghetto is one of the major drivers and has been from the very beginning.
The luxury of our position now is that we can almost assemble any team to address any issue.
The acceptance of certain realities doesn’t preclude idealism. It can lead to certain breakthroughs.
The work in S, M, L, XL was almost suicidal. It required so much effort that our office almost went bankrupt.
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.
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.
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.
Infrastructure is much more important than architecture.
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.
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 else’s hands.
