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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
Direct
Respected
Loved
Proportion
Went
Architecture
Self
Degree
Lack
Defiant
Hatred
Shameless
Degrees
Generated
Exactly
Manhattan
More quotes by Rem Koolhaas
We live in an almost perfect stillness and work with incredible urgency.
Rem Koolhaas
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
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
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.
Rem Koolhaas
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
You need to look at inequality as a typical condition of modern society.
Rem Koolhaas
Architecture is a dangerous mix of power and importance.
Rem Koolhaas
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.
Rem Koolhaas
That has been another interesting discovery: that basically a city [Lagos] could recover from a really deep, deep, deep pit.
Rem Koolhaas
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.
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
There's nothing Dutch about my architecture.
Rem Koolhaas
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
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
Infrastructure is much more important than architecture.
Rem Koolhaas
Our office acts like a kind of educational establishment and we are very careful who we educate.
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
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
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 shopping was still connected to the street it was also an intensification and articulation of the street. Now it has become utterly independent - contained, controlled, surveyed.
Rem Koolhaas