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Infrastructure is much more important than architecture.

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
Infrastructure
Architecture
Important
Much

More quotes by Rem Koolhaas

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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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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.
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Journalists seem mostly interested in what brand of shoes I wear.
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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.
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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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The word 'celebrity' and the word 'architect' are basically incompatible.
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Not many architects have the luxury to reject significant things.
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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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That has been another interesting discovery: that basically a city [Lagos] could recover from a really deep, deep, deep pit.
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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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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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But now sustainability is such a political category that it's getting more and more difficult to think about it in a serious way. Sustainability has become an ornament.
Rem Koolhaas
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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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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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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
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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.
Rem Koolhaas
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Architecture is a dangerous mix of power and importance.
Rem Koolhaas
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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.
Rem Koolhaas
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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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You need to look at inequality as a typical condition of modern society.
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