Quote

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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Rem Koolhaas
Age: 80
Born: 1944
Born: January 1
Architect
Urban Planner
Writer
R'dam
Remment Lucas Koolhaas
Remment Koolhaas
Times
Result
Shops
Suburban
Words
Clean
Bringing
Dullness
Look
York
Incredibly
Cleanliness
Looks
Drug
Area
Suburbs
People
Sex
Drugs
Square
Along
Dull
Homeless
Clinically
Results
Safety
Squares
Hollowed
Values
Areas
Urban
Orderliness

More quotes by Rem Koolhaas

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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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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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The luxury of our position now is that we can almost assemble any team to address any issue.
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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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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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Sustainability has become an ornament.
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Infrastructure is much more important than architecture.
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The stronger the identity, the more it imprisons, the more it resists expansion, interpretation, renewal, contradiction.
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Each building has to be beautiful, but cheap and fast, but it lasts forever. That is already an incredible battery of seemingly contradictory demands. So yes, I'm definitely perhaps contradictory person, but I operate in very contradictory times.
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In this branch of utopian real estate, architecture is no longer the art of designing buildings so much as the brutal skyward extrusion of whatever site the developer has managed to assemble.
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.
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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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Not many architects have the luxury to reject significant things.
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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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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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You need to look at inequality as a typical condition of modern society.
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There's nothing Dutch about my architecture.
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.
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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.
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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.
Rem Koolhaas