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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
Green
Umpires
Design
Designs
Small
Feature
Winning
Increasingly
Features
Literally
Windmill
Somewhere
Competitions
Competition
Windmills

More quotes by Rem Koolhaas

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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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The word 'celebrity' and the word 'architect' are basically incompatible.
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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 rare collective profession: it's always exercised by groups. There is an essential modesty, which is a complete contradiction to the notion of a star.
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We discovered a person in Lagos who had a fish stall, and within a single square metre she carried two children all the way to Harvard. She supported an unbelievable escape of her children into education. In that sense it was a city completed pixillated, and every pixel contained amazing stories.
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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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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 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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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.
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We live in an almost perfect stillness and work with incredible urgency.
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The Metropolis strives to reach a mythical point where the world is completely fabricated by man, so that it absolutely coincides with his desires.
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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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Lagos was the ultimate dysfunctional city - but actually, in terms of all the initiatives and ingenuity, it mobilised an incredibly beautiful, almost utopian landscape of independence and agency.
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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
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Beauty isn't what I'm primarily interested in [in architecture]. I think appropriateness is more important.
Rem Koolhaas
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The beauty of my profession [architecture] lies in its randomness and surprise. And don't think I can choose my projects. I have to build what's offered to me.
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Asia is still dominated by skyscrapers. I hope that, in European cities, it will become a declining trend. They were almost never necessary.
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In Lagos there's a really strong case to resurrect strong parts. Embedded in all of it are some amazing pieces of planning, amazing pieces of engineering and interaction. For instance, the campus of Lagos University is stunningly beautiful, efficient and generous, and that needs to be recognised and preserved.
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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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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.
Rem Koolhaas