Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
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
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
Hope
Dominated
Become
Trend
Stills
Asia
Still
Trends
Never
European
Necessary
Skyscrapers
Cities
Declining
Almost
Skyscraper
More quotes by Rem Koolhaas
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.
Rem Koolhaas
Not many architects have the luxury to reject significant things.
Rem Koolhaas
One cannot completely avoid this landmark character with large buildings such as these. But the city itself is also gigantic.
Rem Koolhaas
The Metropolis strives to reach a mythical point where the world is completely fabricated by man, so that it absolutely coincides with his desires.
Rem Koolhaas
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.
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
Sustainability has become an ornament.
Rem Koolhaas
Beauty isn't what I'm primarily interested in [in architecture]. I think appropriateness is more important.
Rem Koolhaas
Architecture is a dangerous mix of power and importance.
Rem Koolhaas
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.
Rem Koolhaas
Our society can no longer tolerate ugliness. You see that in cars, sofas and women. [But] ugliness also has a right to exist.
Rem Koolhaas
The stronger the identity, the more it imprisons, the more it resists expansion, interpretation, renewal, contradiction.
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
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
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.
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
If you have this reputation you can sit back and endure it, or you can try to do things with it.
Rem Koolhaas
Prada is extremely directed in terms of communicating what they like and what they don't like. That is actually extremely pleasant because it clarifies very easily what you can do and what you need to do.
Rem Koolhaas
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.
Rem Koolhaas
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.
Rem Koolhaas