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Rem Koolhaas Quotes

Remment Lucas 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. He is often cited as a representative of deconstructivism and is the author of ‘Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan’. 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 based in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. In 2005, he co-founded Volume Magazine together with Mark Wigley and Ole Bouman.

He is widely regarded as one of the most important architectural thinkers and urbanists of his generation. In 2000, Rem Koolhaas won the Pritzker Prize. In 2008, Time put him in their top 100 of The World's Most Influential People. Wikipedia  

✵ 17. November 1944
Rem Koolhaas photo
Rem Koolhaas: 11   quotes 0   likes

Famous Rem Koolhaas Quotes

“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

“The city is no longer. We can leave the theatre now.”

Rem Koolhaas

From "Generic City", published in S,M,L,XL, New York: The Monacelli Press, 1995

“Architecture is a dangerous mixture of power and impotence.”

Rem Koolhaas

From S,M,L,XL, New York: The Monacelli Press, 1995

“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. But the generic city, the general urban condition, is happening everywhere, and just the fact that it occurs in such enormous quantities must mean that it's habitable. Architecture can't do anything that the culture doesn't. We all complain that we are confronted by urban environments that are completely similar. 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

From Bauhaus to Koolhaas Interview in Wired magazine http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.07/koolhaas.html (4 July 1996)

“It's very simple and it has nothing to do with identifiable goals. It is to keep thinking about what architecture can be, in whatever form. That is an answer, isn't it? I think that S, M, L, XL has one beautiful ambiguity: it used the past to build a future and is very adamant about giving notice that this is not the end. That's how it felt to me, anyway. That is in itself evidence of a kind of discomfort with achievement measured in terms of identifiable entities, and an announcement that continuity of thinking in whatever form, around whatever subject, is the real ambition.”

Rem Koolhaas

Rem Koolhaas Interview with Jennifer Sigler in Index Magazine http://www.indexmagazine.com/interviews/rem_koolhaas.shtml, (2000)

“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 the first stunning: when beauty 'happens', it is absolutely surprising.”

Rem Koolhaas

From "Learning Japanese", published in S,M,L,XL, New York: The Monacelli Press, 1995

Rem Koolhaas Quotes

“Noting that architecture can no longer keep up with the world: "The areas of consensus shift unbelievably fast; the bubbles of certainty are constantly exploding. 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

interview in Iconey http://www.iconeye.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=2715:rem-koolhaas--icon-013--june-2004, Icon 013, (June 2004)

World

“We were making sand castles. Now we swim in the sea that swept them away”

Rem Koolhaas

What Ever Happened to Urbanism? http://www.arhns.uns.ac.rs/wp-content/uploads/Arch432_koolhaas.pdf The Monicelli Press, New York, 1995, pp. 959/971.

Sea

“Find optimism in the inevitable.”

Rem Koolhaas

From the New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/03/arts/design/03kool.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=Rem+Koolhaas&st=nyt&oref=slogin article on Koolhaas and Dubai appearing March 3rd, 2008. Available here:

Optimism

“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

Rem Koolhaas Interview with Jennifer Sigler in Index Magazine http://www.indexmagazine.com/interviews/rem_koolhaas.shtml, (2000)

“I live in a Victorian apartment building in London.”

Rem Koolhaas

SPIEGEL interview https://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/spiegel-interview-with-dutch-architect-rem-koolhaas-evil-can-also-be-beautiful-a-408748.html, 2006

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