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Rem Koolhaas Quotes

born 1944 Netherlands

Rem Koolhaas (born 17 November 1944 in Rotterdam, Netherlands) is a Dutch architect, former journalist and screenwriter who studied architecture at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London and co-founded the Office for Metropolitan Architecture.

Netherlands
Architects
Non-fiction authors

Random Rem Koolhaas quote

9 quotes

Architecture is a dangerous mixture of power and impotence.

Change tends to fill people with this incredible fear.

Smithsonian Magazine interview (2012)

The city is no longer. We can leave the theatre now.

I live in a Victorian apartment building in London.

Bigness is no longer part of any urban tissue. (...) Its subtext is fuck context.

Find optimism in the inevitable.

Japan lives with drastic segregation between the sublime, the ugly, and the utterly without qualities. Dominance of the last 2 categories makes mere presence of the first stunning: when beauty 'happens', it is absolutely surprising.

We were making sand castles. Now we swim in the sea that swept them away

Noting that architecture can no longer keep up with the world: "The areas of consensus shift unbelievably fast; the bubbles of certainty are constantly exploding. 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.

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Rem Koolhaas (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.