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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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Rem Koolhaas
Age: 81
Born: 1944
Born: January 1
Architect
Urban Planner
Writer
R'dam
Remment Lucas Koolhaas
Remment Koolhaas
Longer
Society
Also
Sofas
Women
Ugliness
Right
Tolerate
Cars
Car
Exist

More quotes by Rem Koolhaas

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The acceptance of certain realities doesn't preclude idealism. It can lead to certain breakthroughs.
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The luxury of our position now is that we can almost assemble any team to address any issue.
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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.
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Sustainability has become an ornament.
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Manhattanism is the one urbanistic ideology that has fed, from its conception, on the splendors and miseries of the metropolitan condition—hyper-density—without once losing faith in it as the basis for a desirable modern culture. Manhattan's architecture is a paradigm for the exploitation of congestion.
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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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Architecture is a dangerous mix of power and importance.
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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.
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The word 'celebrity' and the word 'architect' are basically incompatible.
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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.
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You need to look at inequality as a typical condition of modern society.
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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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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.
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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.
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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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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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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.
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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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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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Infrastructure is much more important than architecture.
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