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Designs are increasingly winning competitions because they are literally green, and because somewhere they feature a small windmill.

Rem Koolhaas

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Rem Koolhaas
Age: 80
Born: 1944
Born: January 1
Architect
Urban Planner
Writer
R'dam
Remment Lucas Koolhaas
Remment Koolhaas
Small
Feature
Winning
Increasingly
Features
Literally
Windmill
Somewhere
Competitions
Competition
Windmills
Green
Umpires
Design
Designs

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Nigeria [in 1990] was all rumour, an unbelievable amount of rumour - largely about crime and almost mythical manifestations of evil.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 public architecture.
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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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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 means you are interested in articulating the evolution, and therefore the potential change, the potential redefinition.
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The stronger the identity, the more it imprisons, the more it resists expansion, interpretation, renewal, contradiction.
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Let's put it this way: One can be happy or unhappy in a building. But some buildings make us more depressed than others.
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I am incredibly bad at predicting the future I am only smart enough to observe the present and listen to my intuition about tendencies.
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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 site the developer has managed to assemble.
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Journalists seem mostly interested in what brand of shoes I wear.
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Manhattan has no choice but the skyward extrusion of the Grid itself only the Skyscraper offers business the wide-open spaces of a man-made Wild West, a frontier in the sky.
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Infrastructure is much more important than architecture.
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Evil can also be beautiful. The Coliseum in Rome, for example, a wonderful structure with an awful past. Just think about the bloody gladiator fights there.
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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 n t u r e... In other words, the utopian enterprise.
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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.
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The people from the suburbs are bringing along their suburban values: cleanliness, orderliness, safety - dullness, in other words. As a result, urban areas are being hollowed out. Just look at Times Square in New York. No more sex shops, no drugs, no homeless people. The area is clinically clean and incredibly dull.
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There's something really interesting about current urbanism: the only model is the universal model, and there is increasingly incapacity to consider the virtues and the qualities that are there, and then to build on them. The only thing is complete transformation.
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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