Rem Koolhaas Quotes

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Project, Architectural

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Battery, Forever

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Sustainability, Difficult

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

  Rem Koolhaas

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Winning, Competition

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Architectural

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Compulsively, Justify

• Influence is a very unpleasant subject and I deal with it in a maybe irresponsible way, which is to really ignore it. It would be a nightmare if we started to really think about it; it would tie our hands, it would tie everyone else’s hands.

  Rem Koolhaas

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Irresponsible, Nightmare

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

  Rem Koolhaas

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Architectural

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

  Rem Koolhaas

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Reputation

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

  Rem Koolhaas

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Consensus, Unbelievably

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Models, Intellectual

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

  Rem Koolhaas

  Topics in Age

  Tags in Sense

• 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.

  Rem Koolhaas

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Acoustic, Architect

• 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.

  Rem Koolhaas

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in City

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

  Rem Koolhaas

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Educational

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Directed

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Architecture

• 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

  Topics in Beauty

  Tags in Singularity, Quality, Identity

• When air conditioning, escalators, and advertising appeared, shopping expanded its scale, but also limited its spontaneity. And it became much more predictable, almost scientific. What had once been the most surprising became the most manipulated.

  Rem Koolhaas

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Escalate, Appeared, Advertising

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Generate, Define

Rem Koolhaas (26)

Birth:	17th November, 1944
Nationality:	Dutch
Profession:	Architect, Professor

About

Remment Lucas "Rem" Koolhaas is a Dutch architect, architectural theorist, urbanist and Professor in Practice of Architecture and Urban Design at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University. Koolhaas studied at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London and at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Koolhaas is the founding partner of OMA, and of its research-oriented counterpart AMO, currently based in Rotterdam, Netherlands.

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