Rem Koolhaas Quotes - Page 2

Quotes about:

• 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.

  Rem Koolhaas

  Years, Discrepancies Between, Culture

  Interview with Marcus Fairs, www.iconeye.com. June 2004.

  87 Copy quote

• Why I talked about political correctness: the colonial is now such a major taboo that any achievement of the colonial period, or any generosity implied in colonialism, is again fundamentally neglected or fundamentally not recognised. That's crazy, because history is a series of layers, and you cannot say, "This layer I support and this layer I cancel." History is history and you cannot retrospectively manipulate it.

  Rem Koolhaas

  Crazy, Generosity, Support

  "'Lagos shows how a city can recover from a deep, deep pit': Rem Koolhaas talks to Kunlé Adeyemi". Interview with Chris Michael, www.theguardian.com. February 26, 2016.

  25 Copy quote

• 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.

  Rem Koolhaas

  Stars, Groups, Essentials

  "The NS Interview: Rem Koolhaas, architect". Interview with Samira Shackle, www.newstatesman.com. May 16, 2012.

  25 Copy quote

• Manhattan is an accumulation of possible disasters that never happen.

  Rem Koolhaas

  Manhattan, Disaster, Accumulation

  17 Copy quote

• 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.

  Rem Koolhaas

  Beautiful, Forever, Batteries

  9 Copy quote

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

  Rem Koolhaas

  Almost Perfect, Incredibles, Stillness

  11 Copy quote

• There's nothing Dutch about my architecture.

  Rem Koolhaas

  Dutch, Architecture

  4 Copy quote

• I like fashion, whether or not it's overpriced, because it creates a sense of the sublime with relatively few means.

  Rem Koolhaas

  Fashion, Mean, Sublime

  "'Evil Can also Be Beautiful'". Interview with Matthias Matussek and Joachim Kronsbein, www.spiegel.de. March 27, 2006.

  5 Copy quote

• In this branch of utopian real estate, architecture is no longer the art of designing buildings so much as the brutal skyward extrusion of whatever site the developer has managed to assemble.

  Rem Koolhaas

  Art, Real, Design

  17 Copy quote

• 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

  Cities, Trends, Asia

  39 Copy quote

• 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

  Thinking, Play, Discipline

  19 Copy quote

• The Grid makes the history of architecture and all previous lessons of urbanism irrelevant. It forces Manhattan's builders to develop a new system of formal values, to invent strategies for the distinction of one block from another. The Grid's two-dimensional discipline also creates undreamt-of freedom for three-dimensional anarchy. The Grid defines a new balance between control and de-control in which the city can be at the same time ordered and fluid, a metropolis of rigid chaos.

  Rem Koolhaas

  Block, Cities, Two

  17 Copy quote

• The beauty of my profession [architecture] lies in its randomness and surprise. And don't think I can choose my projects. I have to build what's offered to me.

  Rem Koolhaas

  Lying, Thinking, Architecture

  Source: www.spiegel.de

  9 Copy quote

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

  Rem Koolhaas

  Character, Cities, Building

  "'Evil Can also Be Beautiful'". Interview with Matthias Matussek and Joachim Kronsbein, www.spiegel.de. March 27, 2006.

  14 Copy quote

• The Metropolis strives to reach a mythical point where the world is completely fabricated by man, so that it absolutely coincides with his desires.

  Rem Koolhaas

  Men, Desire, World

  Rem Koolhaas (2014). “Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan”, p.493, The Monacelli Press, LLC

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Mean, Perspective, Evolution

  39 Copy quote

• 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.

  Rem Koolhaas

  Thinking, Political, Ornaments

  34 Copy quote

• 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.

  Rem Koolhaas

  Independent, Shopping, Articulation

  11 Copy quote

• Most old cities are now sclerotic machines that dispense known qualities in ever-greater quantities, instead of laboratories of the uncertain. Only the skyscraper offers business the wide-open spaces of a man-made Wild West, a frontier in the sky.

  Rem Koolhaas

  Men, Cities, Space

  16 Copy quote

• 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.

  Rem Koolhaas

  Needs, Prada, Term

  19 Copy quote

• 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

  Unhappy, Way, Building

  "'Evil Can also Be Beautiful'". Interview with Matthias Matussek and Joachim Kronsbein, www.spiegel.de. March 27, 2006.

  8 Copy quote

• 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.

  Rem Koolhaas

  Hands, Feelings, Architect

  16 Copy quote

• 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.

  Rem Koolhaas

  Thinking, Intellectual, Important

  30 Copy quote

• You need to look at inequality as a typical condition of modern society.

  Rem Koolhaas

  Typical, Needs, Looks

  "'Lagos shows how a city can recover from a deep, deep pit': Rem Koolhaas talks to Kunlé Adeyemi". Interview with Chris Michael, www.theguardian.com. February 26, 2016.

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Smart, Intuition, Enough

  "The Invention and Reinvention of the City: An Interview with Rem Koolhaas". Interview with Paul Fraioli, jia.sipa.columbia.edu. April 19, 2012.

  7 Copy quote

Page 2 of 4

First

← Prev

1

2

3

4

Next →

• facebook
• twitter
• googleplus
• email
• linkedin