Rem Koolhaas Quotes

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  • Architect
  • born 1944
  • 100 quotes

Rem Koolhaas, an architect (born 1944), is quoted 100 times on QuoteForever. The subjects that come up most often are Architecture, Cities, Architect and Building.

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Find optimism in the inevitable.

Sustainability has become an ornament.

There's nothing Dutch about my architecture.

The good is not a category that interests me.

Without a tighter union, Europe will disintegrate

I wanted to disconnect from contemporary architecture

Architecture is a dangerous mix of power and importance.

Infrastructure is much more important than architecture.

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

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

Not many architects have the luxury to reject significant things.

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

Manhattan is an accumulation of possible disasters that never happen.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 is quoted on

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