Rem Koolhaas quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Rem Koolhaas

Rem Koolhaas Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Rem Koolhaas on Wise Famous Quotes.

Our society can no longer tolerate ugliness. You see that in cars, sofas and women. [But] ugliness also has a right to exist.

The good is not a category that interests me.

One of our theories is that one can offset this excessive compulsion toward the spectacular with a return to simplicity.

Beauty isn't what I'm primarily interested in [in architecture]. I think appropriateness is more important.

Nigeria [in 1990] was all rumour, an unbelievable amount of rumour - largely about crime and almost mythical manifestations of evil.

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

Escape from the architecture ghetto is one of the major drivers and has been from the very beginning.

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.

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

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

Infrastructure is much more important than architecture.

Asia is still dominated by skyscrapers. I hope that, in European cities, it will become a declining trend. They were almost never necessary.

The word 'celebrity' and the word 'architect' are basically incompatible.

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.

There's nothing Dutch about my architecture.

The areas of consensus shift unbelievably fast; the bubbles of certainty are constantly exploding.

If less is more, maybe nothing is everything.

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

Our office acts like a kind of educational establishment and we are very careful who we educate.

Find optimism in the inevitable

The stronger the identity, the more it imprisons, the more it resists expansion, interpretation, renewal, contradiction.

The cosmetic is cosmic.

Not many architects have the luxury to reject significant things.

Lagos was not very inviting even to Lagosians. It was considered a no-go zone, almost in its entirety.

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

That has been another interesting discovery: that basically a city [Lagos] could recover from a really deep, deep, deep pit.

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.

The work in S, M, L, XL was almost suicidal. It required so much effort that our office almost went bankrupt.

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

The City is an addictive machine from which there is no escape

I wanted to disconnect from contemporary architecture

If you have this reputation you can sit back and endure it, or you can try to do things with it.

The acceptance of certain realities doesn't preclude idealism. It can lead to certain breakthroughs.

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

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

It is not possible to live in this age if you don't have a sense of many contradictory forces.

Architecture is a dangerous mix of power and importance.

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

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

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

Without a tighter union, Europe will disintegrate

Journalists seem mostly interested in what brand of shoes I wear.

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

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

Nobody should be anything, but because I once had a different profession and I'm interested in writing, I took it upon me.