Rem Koolhaas Quotes

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Connected, Street

• 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 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

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

  Rem Koolhaas

  Topics in Work

  Tags in Live

• 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

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

  Rem Koolhaas

  Topics in Effort

  Tags in Required

• The thing is that I have a really intense, almost compulsive need to record. But it doesn’t end there, because what I record is somehow transformed into a creative thing. There is a continuity. Recording is the beginning of a conceptual production. I am somehow collapsing the two – recording and producing – into a single event.

  Rem Koolhaas

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Compulsively, Creative

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

  Rem Koolhaas

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Assemble

• 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

• 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

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

  Rem Koolhaas

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Consensus, Unbelievably

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

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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Births

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• 1951 - Phil Collins
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Deaths

• 1926 - W. L. George
• 1948 - Orville Wright
• 2007 - Sidney Sheldon
• 2006 - Wendy Wasserstein