Rem Koolhaas quotes - page 2

The luxury of our position now is that we can almost assemble any team to address any issue. (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. View quote
Rem Koolhaas
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. View quote
Rem Koolhaas
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. View quote
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. View quote
Rem Koolhaas
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. View quote
Rem Koolhaas
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. View quote
Rem Koolhaas
There are books that I own that somehow even without reading them they mean something to me. So I think people have a relationship with books in a library whether you've come specifically to read them or not. View quote
Rem Koolhaas
Architecture has been a domain of architects, a discipline presumably dominated by immaculately dressed bookish pedants that have a stream of thought well displaced from regular human thought. View quote
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. View quote
Rem Koolhaas
Infrastructure is much more important than architecture. (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. View quote
Rem Koolhaas
I am incredibly bad at predicting the future; I am only smart enough to observe the present and listen to my intuition about tendencies. View quote
Rem Koolhaas
There's nothing Dutch about my architecture. View quote
Rem Koolhaas
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. View quote
Rem Koolhaas
One of our theories is that one can offset this excessive compulsion toward the spectacular with a return to simplicity. View quote
Rem Koolhaas
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. View quote
Rem Koolhaas
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. View quote
Rem Koolhaas
Nobody should be anything, but because I once had a different profession and I'm interested in writing, I took it upon me. View quote
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. View quote
Rem Koolhaas
Journalists seem mostly interested in what brand of shoes I wear. (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. View quote
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. View quote
Rem Koolhaas
The acceptance of certain realities doesn't preclude idealism. It can lead to certain breakthroughs. View quote
Rem Koolhaas
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. View quote
Rem Koolhaas