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The stronger the identity, the more it imprisons, the more it resists expansion, interpretation, renewal, contradiction.

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
Contradiction
Interpretation
Identity
Stronger
Imprisons
Resists
Renewal
Expansion

More quotes by Rem Koolhaas

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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.
Rem Koolhaas
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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
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We live in an almost perfect stillness and work with incredible urgency.
Rem Koolhaas
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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.
Rem Koolhaas
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There is no plateau of resting or stabilising. Once you are interested in how things evolve, you have a kind of never-ending perspective, because it means you are interested in articulating the evolution, and therefore the potential change, the potential redefinition.
Rem Koolhaas
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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.
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.
Rem Koolhaas
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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.
Rem Koolhaas
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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
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Nigeria [in 1990] was all rumour, an unbelievable amount of rumour - largely about crime and almost mythical manifestations of evil.
Rem Koolhaas
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Our office acts like a kind of educational establishment and we are very careful who we educate.
Rem Koolhaas
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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.
Rem Koolhaas
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The acceptance of certain realities doesn't preclude idealism. It can lead to certain breakthroughs.
Rem Koolhaas
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Manhattan has no choice but the skyward extrusion of the Grid itself only the Skyscraper offers business the wide-open spaces of a man-made Wild West, a frontier in the sky.
Rem Koolhaas
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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.
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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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
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If you have this reputation you can sit back and endure it, or you can try to do things with it.
Rem Koolhaas
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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.
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.
Rem Koolhaas