Rem Koolhaas Quotes

Evil can also be beautiful. The Coliseum in Rome, for example, a wonderful structure with an awful past. Just think about the bloody gladiator fights there.

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.

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

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.

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.

Architecture is a hazardous mixture of omnipotence and impotence. It is by definition a c h a o t i c a d v e n t u r e... In other words, the utopian enterprise.

The good is not a category that interests me.

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

Find optimism in the inevitable.

Not many architects have the luxury to reject significant things.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Manhattan has no choice but the skyward extrusion of the Grid itself; only the Skyscraper offers business the wide-open spaces of a man-made Wild West, a frontier in the sky.

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.

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

The great problem of the concert hall is that the shoebox is the ideal shape for acoustics but that no architect worth their names wants to build a shoebox.

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

Sustainability has become an ornament.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Without a tighter union, Europe will disintegrate

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

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

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

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

There's nothing Dutch about my architecture.

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.

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

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.

Manhattan has generated a shameless architecture that has been loved in direct proportion to its defiant lack of self-hatred, has been respected exactly to the degree that it went too far.