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That has been another interesting discovery: that basically a city [Lagos] could recover from a really deep, deep, deep pit.

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
Discovery
City
Deep
Cities
Interesting
Lagos
Another
Pits
Really
Recover
Basically

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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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
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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.
Rem Koolhaas
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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.
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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The word 'celebrity' and the word 'architect' are basically incompatible.
Rem Koolhaas
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Journalists seem mostly interested in what brand of shoes I wear.
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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Beauty isn't what I'm primarily interested in [in architecture]. I think appropriateness is more important.
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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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.
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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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.
Rem Koolhaas
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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.
Rem Koolhaas
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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.
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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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.
Rem Koolhaas
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There's nothing Dutch about my architecture.
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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We live in an almost perfect stillness and work with incredible urgency.
Rem Koolhaas