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. – Rem Koolhaas
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
The areas of consensus shift unbelievably fast; the bubbles of certainty are constantly exploding. – Rem Koolhaas
Any architectural project we do takes at least four or five years, so increasingly there is a discrepancy between the acceleration of culture and the continuing slowness of architecture. – Rem Koolhaas
Designs are increasingly winning competitions because they are literally green, and because somewhere they feature a small windmill. – Rem Koolhaas
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
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. – Rem Koolhaas
I am incredibly bad at predicting the future; I am only smart enough to observe the present and listen to my intuition about tendencies. – Rem Koolhaas
That has been my entire life story, running against the current and running with the current. Sometimes running with the current is underestimated. – Rem Koolhaas
I think one of the important evolutions is that we no longer feel compulsively the need to argue, or to justify things on a kind of rational level. We are much more willing to admit that certain things are completely instinctive and others are really intellectual. – Rem Koolhaas
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
It’s a weird city because the uglier the weather, the more beautiful the city. And the uglier the buildings, the more coherent the city. – Rem Koolhaas
People can inhabit anything. And they can be miserable in anything and ecstatic in anything. More and more I think that architecture has nothing to do with it. Of course, that’s both liberating and alarming. – Rem Koolhaas
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. – Rem Koolhaas
The luxury of our position now is that we can almost assemble any team to address any issue. – Rem Koolhaas
Influence is a very unpleasant subject and I deal with it in a maybe irresponsible way, which is to really ignore it. It would be a nightmare if we started to really think about it; it would tie our hands, it would tie everyone else’s hands. – Rem Koolhaas
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
The acceptance of certain realities doesn’t preclude idealism. It can lead to certain breakthroughs. – Rem Koolhaas
One of our theories is that one can offset this excessive compulsion toward the spectacular with a return to simplicity. – Rem Koolhaas
I’d say that my profession ends where architectural thinking ends – architectural thinking in terms of thinking about programs and organizational structure. These abstractions play a role in many other disciplines, and those disciplines are now defining their ‘architectures’ as well. – Rem Koolhaas
Escape from the architecture ghetto is one of the major drivers and has been from the very beginning. – Rem Koolhaas
What is now called ‘green architecture’ is an opportunistic caricature of a much deeper consideration of the issues related to sustainability that architecture has been engaged with for many years. It was one of the first professions that was deeply concerned with these issues and that had an intellectual response to them. – Rem Koolhaas
We felt it was very important for an entity like CCTV to make its presence felt… To generate a space and to define a space, that is the main thing. – Rem Koolhaas
