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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

More quotes by Rem Koolhaas

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We live in an almost perfect stillness and work with incredible urgency.
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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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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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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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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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Infrastructure is much more important than architecture.
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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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But now sustainability is such a political category that it's getting more and more difficult to think about it in a serious way. Sustainability has become an ornament.
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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.
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.
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There's nothing Dutch about my architecture.
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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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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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.
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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.
Rem Koolhaas
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You need to look at inequality as a typical condition of modern society.
Rem Koolhaas
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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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Nigeria [in 1990] was all rumour, an unbelievable amount of rumour - largely about crime and almost mythical manifestations of evil.
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Beauty isn't what I'm primarily interested in [in architecture]. I think appropriateness is more important.
Rem Koolhaas