Best Rem Koolhaas Quotes & Sayings

Manhattanism is the one urbanistic ideology that has fed, from its conception, on the splendors and miseries of the metropolitan condition - hyper-density - without once losing faith in it as the basis for a desirable modern culture. Manhattan's architecture is a paradigm for the exploitation of congestion. — Rem Koolhaas

If less is more, maybe nothing is everything. — Rem Koolhaas

Lagos was the ultimate dysfunctional city - but actually, in terms of all the initiatives and ingenuity, it mobilised an incredibly beautiful, almost utopian landscape of independence and agency. — Rem Koolhaas

That has been my entire life story, running against the current and running with the current. Sometimes running with the current is underestimated. — Rem Koolhaas

With the idea that a single creator can build a society wherein a huge number of people will live, Le Corbusier later approached Stalin. In India, he charmed a powerful provincial family and ended up making huge, sculptural relics in Chandigarh. — Masato Otaka

I am incredibly bad at predicting the future; I am only smart enough to observe the present and listen to my intuition about tendencies. — Rem Koolhaas

Let's put it this way: One can be happy or unhappy in a building. But some buildings make us more depressed than others. — 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. — 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. — Rem Koolhaas

In the end, there will be little else for us to do but shop. — Rem Koolhaas

The luxury of our position now is that we can almost assemble any team to address any issue. — Rem Koolhaas

As more and more architecture is finally unmasked as the mere organization of flow - shopping centers, airports - it is evident that circulation is what makes or breaks public architecture ... — Rem Koolhaas

I believe architecture is a cultural output and I think Rem Koolhaas is one of the rare individuals who was able to really output architecture as cultural artifact. — Jimenez Lai

It was a book [George Packer written on our presence in Nigeria] that was killed by the response of other people. Which sounds quite cowardly, perhaps, but it was the first manifestation of what is currently a really big issue: how political correctness defines the limits of what you can do. In that sense, it was super-exciting and maybe the most magical project we did, but at the same time fraught with mixed feelings. — 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

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. — Rem Koolhaas

The word 'celebrity' and the word 'architect' are basically incompatible. — Rem Koolhaas

Talk about beauty and you get boring answers, but talk about ugliness and things get interesting. — Rem Koolhaas

We live in an almost perfect stillness and work with incredible urgency. — 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

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

One cannot completely avoid this landmark character with large buildings such as these. But the city itself is also gigantic. — Rem Koolhaas

At that time [90th in Lagos], if you drove through the city, you drove through a foreground that always seemed to be incredibly dramatic and incredibly agonised - smoking, burning, incredible compression. In the first year we stayed on the ground and went everywhere. But then in order to discover whether this was the whole story, we rented a helicopter. And we began to understand that this is not chaos but a highly modern system that had been abandoned, then at some point went into reversal, then slowly came out of it. — Rem Koolhaas

Criticism per se does not worry me. I've always solicited it as part of the design process. — Rem Koolhaas

When we went in the late 1990s, Nigeria was still in a dictatorship. So we didn't go with a mission. It started really with a sort of blankness and open-endedness. — 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

I wanted to disconnect from contemporary architecture — 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. — Rem Koolhaas

Architecture is a dangerous mix of power and importance. — Rem Koolhaas

Everyone is talking about sustainability and resilience, yet all that knowledge is thrown in the bin. [Lagos is] a unique case, but also a test case. It's unbelievably unique, but also it's now considered with a number of really generic opinions, generic solution, generic expectations. — Rem Koolhaas

Designs are increasingly winning competitions because they are literally green, and because somewhere they feature a small windmill. — Rem Koolhaas

The good is not a category that interests me. — Rem Koolhaas