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Rem Koolhaas citations

Remment « Rem » Lucas Koolhaas, né le 17 novembre 1944 à Rotterdam est un architecte, théoricien de l’architecture et urbaniste néerlandais.

Il occupe actuellement le poste de professeur en architecture et design urbain à la Harvard Graduate School of Design, aux États-Unis. Koolhaas a étudié à la Netherlands Film and Television Academy d'Amsterdam, à l'Architectural Association School of Architecture de Londres, ainsi qu'à l'université Cornell d'Ithaca .

Il fonde en 1975 à Londres, l'Office for Metropolitan Architecture , avec Elia et Zoe Zenghelis, et Madelon Vriesendorp. L’objet de ce bureau d’architectes est « de définir de nouveaux types de relations théoriques et pratiques entre l’architecture et la situation culturelle contemporaine ». L’agence gagne en renommée grâce à plusieurs projets architecturaux et concepts urbains : l’extension du Binnenhof, le siège du Parlement néerlandais à La Haye , la prison de Koepel de style panoptique à Arnhem , et deux bibliothèques pour le campus universitaire de Jussieu à Paris . Un deuxième bureau est ouvert en 1978 à Rotterdam.

En 1990, alors que l'OMA travaillait sur le siège social d’Universal, il est confronté pour la première fois au bouleversement des médias et du monde virtuel. Le cabinet se scinde en deux et une partie se tourne vers le design et la recherche, et se baptise AMO. « L'OMA reste voué à la réalisation des bâtiments et des schémas directeurs » et l'« AMO opère dans des zones au-delà des frontières traditionnelles de l'architecture » selon Koolhaas. Il interagit également avec les médias, la politique, la sociologie, les énergies renouvelables, la technologie, la mode, la conservation, l'édition et le graphisme.

En 2000, Rem Koolhaas reçoit le prix Pritzker. Huit ans plus tard, il intègre la liste du magazine Time des 100 personnalités les plus influentes dans le monde. En 2010, il reçoit le lion d'or pour l’ensemble de son œuvre remis par Kazuyo Sejima lors de la 12e exposition internationale d'architecture de Venise.

En 2017, l'OMA compte sept bureaux installés à Londres, Rotterdam, New York, Hong Kong, Pékin, Doha et Dubaî.

Koolhaas est connu de ses pairs pour son ouvrage New-York Delire, un manifeste rétroactif pour Manhattan, 1978 et pour S,M,L,XL, écrit avec le graphiste Bruce Mau et qui établit plusieurs normes de l'architecture contemporaine. Wikipedia  

✵ 17. novembre 1944
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Rem Koolhaas: 11   citations 0   J'aime

Rem Koolhaas: Citations en anglais

“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.”

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Rem Koolhaas

“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.”

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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.”

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

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

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Rem Koolhaas

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

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

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

“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.”

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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)

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

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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.

“Find optimism in the inevitable.”

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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:

“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.”

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

“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.”

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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.”

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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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