Rem Koolhaas
21 quotes
Biography
Remment Lucas Koolhaas is a Dutch architect, architectural theorist, urbanist, and Professor in Practice of Architecture and Urban Design at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University. He is often cited as a representative of deconstructivism and is the author of Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan.
"Architecture is a dangerous mixture of power and impotence."
"Find optimism in the inevitable."
"I live in a Victorian apartment building in London."
"The city is no longer. We can leave the theatre now."
"Bigness is no longer part of any urban tissue. (...) Its subtext is fuck context."
"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."
"Noting that architecture can no longer keep up with the world: "The areas of consensus shift unbelievably fast; the bubbles of certainty are constantly exploding. 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."
"It is not possible to live in this age if you don't have a sense of many contradictory forces."
"Not many architects have the luxury to reject significant things."
"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."
"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."
"Escape from the architecture ghetto is one of the major drivers and has been from the very beginning."
"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."
"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."
"Asia is still dominated by skyscrapers. I hope that, in European cities, it will become a declining trend. They were almost never necessary."
"There's nothing Dutch about my architecture."
"Infrastructure is much more important than architecture."
"Designs are increasingly winning competitions because they are literally green, and because somewhere they feature a small windmill."
"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."
"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."
"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."