Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
We live in an almost perfect stillness and work with incredible urgency.
Rem Koolhaas
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
Rem Koolhaas
Age: 80
Born: 1944
Born: January 1
Architect
Urban Planner
Writer
R'dam
Remment Lucas Koolhaas
Remment Koolhaas
Stillness
Incredible
Almost
Perfect
Live
Work
Urgency
More quotes by Rem Koolhaas
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.
Rem Koolhaas
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.
Rem Koolhaas
Sustainability has become an ornament.
Rem Koolhaas
One cannot completely avoid this landmark character with large buildings such as these. But the city itself is also gigantic.
Rem Koolhaas
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.
Rem Koolhaas
Beauty isn't what I'm primarily interested in [in architecture]. I think appropriateness is more important.
Rem Koolhaas
The word 'celebrity' and the word 'architect' are basically incompatible.
Rem Koolhaas
Architecture is a dangerous mix of power and importance.
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
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
That has been another interesting discovery: that basically a city [Lagos] could recover from a really deep, deep, deep pit.
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
Not many architects have the luxury to reject significant things.
Rem Koolhaas
Lagos has also had a particular effect on my career. I was there early, and although it was a courageous step to go there and invest on this scale - I went there maybe 20 times - it's also been also super-controversial. There's an old school of thought that somebody like me has no place to go there.Because of colonialism and so on.
Rem Koolhaas
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
The luxury of our position now is that we can almost assemble any team to address any issue.
Rem Koolhaas
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.
Rem Koolhaas
If you have this reputation you can sit back and endure it, or you can try to do things with it.
Rem Koolhaas
That has been my entire life story. Running against the current and running with the current. Sometimes running with the current is underestimated. The acceptance of certain realities doesn’t preclude idealism. It can lead to certain breakthroughs.
Rem Koolhaas
There's nothing Dutch about my architecture.
Rem Koolhaas