Rem Koolhaas quotes - page 2

Rem Koolhaas is a Dutch architect, architectural theorist, and urbanist renowned for his innovative and unconventional designs. His firm, OMA, has completed numerous influential projects around the world, blending theory and practice in architecture. He has significantly shaped contemporary architectural discourse and inspired generations of architects. Here are 53 of his 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

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

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

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

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

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

There are books that I own that somehow even without reading them they mean something to me. So I think people have a relationship with books in a library whether you've come specifically to read them or not.

Rem Koolhaas

Architecture has been a domain of architects, a discipline presumably dominated by immaculately dressed bookish pedants that have a stream of thought well displaced from regular human thought.

Rem Koolhaas

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.

Rem Koolhaas

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.

Rem Koolhaas

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

Rem Koolhaas

There's nothing Dutch about my architecture.

Rem Koolhaas

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

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

Rem Koolhaas

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

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

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

Rem Koolhaas

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

Rem Koolhaas

Miami Beach is a completely interesting hybrid because it is, on the one hand, a resort and, on the other hand, a real city. This condition of city and water on two sides I think is really amazing. And in the heart of that city, it has put an enormous convention center, an enormous physical presence.

Rem Koolhaas

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.

Rem Koolhaas

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

Rem Koolhaas

What is now called "green architecture" is an opportunistic caricature of a much deeper consideration of the issues related to sustainability that architecture has been engaged with for many years. It was one of the first professions that was deeply concerned with these issues and that had an intellectual response to them.

Rem Koolhaas