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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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Rem Koolhaas
Age: 80
Born: 1944
Born: January 1
Architect
Urban Planner
Writer
R'dam
Remment Lucas Koolhaas
Remment Koolhaas
Hatred
Shameless
Degrees
Generated
Exactly
Manhattan
Direct
Respected
Loved
Proportion
Went
Architecture
Self
Degree
Lack
Defiant

More quotes by 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.
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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.
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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.
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We live in an almost perfect stillness and work with incredible urgency.
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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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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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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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Architecture is a dangerous mix of power and importance.
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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.
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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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That has been another interesting discovery: that basically a city [Lagos] could recover from a really deep, deep, deep pit.
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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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Journalists seem mostly interested in what brand of shoes I wear.
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Architecture is a rare collective profession: it's always exercised by groups. There is an essential modesty, which is a complete contradiction to the notion of a star.
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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.
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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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Designs are increasingly winning competitions because they are literally green, and because somewhere they feature a small windmill.
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You need to look at inequality as a typical condition of modern society.
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Our office acts like a kind of educational establishment and we are very careful who we educate.
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Miami Beach is a completely interesting hybrid because it is, on the one hand, a resort and, on the other hand, a real city. This condition of city and water on two sides I think is really amazing. And in the heart of that city, it has put an enormous convention center, an enormous physical presence.
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