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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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Rem Koolhaas
Age: 80
Born: 1944
Born: January 1
Architect
Urban Planner
Writer
R'dam
Remment Lucas Koolhaas
Remment Koolhaas
Evil
Manifestations
Nigeria
Unbelievable
Largely
Manifestation
Crime
Rumour
Amount
Rumours
Almost
Mythical

More quotes by 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.
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Journalists seem mostly interested in what brand of shoes I wear.
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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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Architecture is a dangerous mix of power and importance.
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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.
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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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Let's put it this way: One can be happy or unhappy in a building. But some buildings make us more depressed than others.
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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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That has been my entire life story. Running against the current and running with the current. Sometimes running with the current is underestimated. The acceptance of certain realities doesn’t preclude idealism. It can lead to certain breakthroughs.
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Beauty isn't what I'm primarily interested in [in architecture]. I think appropriateness is more important.
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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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You need to look at inequality as a typical condition of modern society.
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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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Evil can also be beautiful. The Coliseum in Rome, for example, a wonderful structure with an awful past. Just think about the bloody gladiator fights there.
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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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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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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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The acceptance of certain realities doesn't preclude idealism. It can lead to certain breakthroughs.
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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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