Rem Koolhaas Quotes

53 quotes in 734 categories

• The acceptance of certain realities doesn't preclude idealism. It can lead to certain breakthroughs.
• Architecture is a dangerous mix of power and importance.
• That has been my entire life story. Running against the current and running with the current. Sometimes running with the current is underestimated. The acceptance…
• The City is an addictive machine from which there is no escape
• 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…
• The Metropolis strives to reach a mythical point where the world is completely fabricated by man, so that it absolutely coincides with his desires.
• Find optimism in the inevitable
• Manhattanism is the one urbanistic ideology that has fed, from its conception, on the splendors and miseries of the metropolitan condition—hyper-density—without once losing faith in…
• In the end, there will be little else for us to do but shop.
• There is no plateau of resting or stabilising. Once you are interested in how things evolve, you have a kind of never-ending perspective, because it…
• 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…
• If you have this reputation you can sit back and endure it, or you can try to do things with it.
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• When shopping was still connected to the street it was also an intensification and articulation of the street. Now it has become utterly independent -…
• Japan lives with drastic segregation between the sublime, the ugly, and the utterly without qualities. Dominance of the last 2 categories makes mere presence of…
• As more and more architecture is finally unmasked as the mere organization of flow—shopping centers, airports—it is evident that circulation is what makes or breaks…
• 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…
• Without a tighter union, Europe will disintegrate

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