Rem Koolhaas quotes

Rem Koolhaas, an influential Dutch architect and thinker, revolutionized the world of modern architecture. As founder of architectural firm OMA (Office for Metropolitan Architecture), Koolhaas designed iconic structures like the CCTV Headquarters in Beijing and the Seattle Central Library. With a unique vision, he challenges traditional conventions, blending urbanism, technology, and culture seamlessly. Koolhaas's innovative approach has earned him prestigious accolades, including the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 2000. Explore the genius of Rem Koolhaas, his visionary designs, and his lasting impact on the architectural landscape.

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

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

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

The work in S, M, L, XL was almost suicidal. It required so much effort that our office almost went bankrupt.

- 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

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

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

Escape from the architecture ghetto is one of the major drivers and has been from the very beginning.

- Rem Koolhaas

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

If you have this reputation you can sit back and endure it, or you can try to do things with it.

- 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

The intellectual force of the West is still dominant, but other cultures are getting stronger. I expect that we will develop a new way of thinking in architecture and urban planning, and that less will be based on our models.

- Rem Koolhaas

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

Not many architects have the luxury to reject significant things.

- Rem Koolhaas

It is not possible to live in this age if you don't have a sense of many contradictory forces.

- 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

The areas of consensus shift unbelievably fast; the bubbles of certainty are constantly exploding.

- Rem Koolhaas

The luxury of our position now is that we can almost assemble any team to address any issue.

- Rem Koolhaas

Our office acts like a kind of educational establishment and we are very careful who we educate.

- 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

One of our theories is that one can offset this excessive compulsion toward the spectacular with a return to simplicity.

- Rem Koolhaas

We live in an almost perfect stillness and work with incredible urgency.

- Rem Koolhaas

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

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

Designs are increasingly winning competitions because they are literally green, and because somewhere they feature a small windmill.

- 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