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Beauty isn't what I'm primarily interested in [in architecture]. I think appropriateness is more important.

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
Thinking
Appropriateness
Primarily
Architecture
Interested
Beauty
Important
Think

More quotes by Rem Koolhaas

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Designs are increasingly winning competitions because they are literally green, and because somewhere they feature a small windmill.
Rem Koolhaas
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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.
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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Asia is still dominated by skyscrapers. I hope that, in European cities, it will become a declining trend. They were almost never necessary.
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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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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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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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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There's nothing Dutch about my architecture.
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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Architecture is a dangerous mix of power and importance.
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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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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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
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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.
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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Not many architects have the luxury to reject significant things.
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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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