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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.

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
Necessary
Skyscrapers
Cities
Declining
Almost
Skyscraper
Hope
Dominated
Become
Trend
Stills
Asia
Still
Trends
Never
European

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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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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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The stronger the identity, the more it imprisons, the more it resists expansion, interpretation, renewal, contradiction.
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The acceptance of certain realities doesn't preclude idealism. It can lead to certain breakthroughs.
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We live in an almost perfect stillness and work with incredible urgency.
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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.
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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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One cannot completely avoid this landmark character with large buildings such as these. But the city itself is also gigantic.
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Beauty isn't what I'm primarily interested in [in architecture]. I think appropriateness is more important.
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I like fashion, whether or not it's overpriced, because it creates a sense of the sublime with relatively few means.
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Manhattan has generated a shameless architecture that has been loved in direct proportion to its defiant lack of self-hatred, has been respected exactly to the degree that it went too far.
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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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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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Sustainability has become an ornament.
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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.
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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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Designs are increasingly winning competitions because they are literally green, and because somewhere they feature a small windmill.
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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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Journalists seem mostly interested in what brand of shoes I wear.
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