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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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Rem Koolhaas
Age: 80
Born: 1944
Born: January 1
Architect
Urban Planner
Writer
R'dam
Remment Lucas Koolhaas
Remment Koolhaas
Way
Make
Depressed
Buildings
Unhappy
Building
Happy
Others

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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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Nigeria [in 1990] was all rumour, an unbelievable amount of rumour - largely about crime and almost mythical manifestations of evil.
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We live in an almost perfect stillness and work with incredible urgency.
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Journalists seem mostly interested in what brand of shoes I wear.
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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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You need to look at inequality as a typical condition of modern society.
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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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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.
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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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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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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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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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Prada is extremely directed in terms of communicating what they like and what they don't like. That is actually extremely pleasant because it clarifies very easily what you can do and what you need to do.
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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.
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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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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.
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Not many architects have the luxury to reject significant things.
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Infrastructure is much more important than architecture.
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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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