35 Inspirational Rem Koolhaas Quotes On Success

Remment Lucas Koolhaas  is a Dutch architect, architectural theorist, urbanist and Professor in Practice of Architecture and Urban Design at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University. He is often cited as a representative of Deconstructivism and is the author of Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan. He is seen by some as one of the truly significant architectural thinkers and urbanists of his generation, by others as a self-important iconoclast. In 2000, Rem Koolhaas won the Pritzker Prize. In 2008, Time put him in their top 100 of The World’s Most Influential People. Remment Koolhaas, usually abbreviated to Rem Koolhaas, was born on 17 November 1944 in Rotterdam, Netherlands, to Anton Koolhaas (1912–1992) and Selinde Pietertje Roosenburg (born 1920). His father was a novelist, critic, and screenwriter. Two documentary films by Bert Haanstra for which his father wrote the scenarios were nominated for an Academy Award for Documentary Feature, one won a Golden Bear for Short Film. His maternal grandfather, Dirk Roosenburg (1887–1962), was a modernist architect who worked for Hendrik Petrus Berlage, before opening his own practice. Rem Koolhaas has a brother, Thomas, and a sister, Annabel. His paternal cousin was the architect and urban planner Teun Koolhaas (1940–2007). The family lived consecutively in Rotterdam (until 1946), Amsterdam (1946–1952), Jakarta (1952–1955), and Amsterdam (from 1955). May these Rem Koolhaas Quotes On Success inspire you to take action so that you may live your dreams.

1. “You need to look at inequality as a typical condition of modern society.” Rem Koolhaas

2. “Asia is still dominated by skyscrapers. I hope that, in European cities, it will become a declining trend. They were almost never necessary.” Rem Koolhaas

3. “The City is an addictive machine from which there is no escape.” Rem Koolhaas

4. “The good is not a category that interests me.” Rem Koolhaas

5. “There is no plateau of resting or stabilising. Once you are interested in how things evolve, you have a kind of never-ending perspective, because it means you are interested in articulating the evolution, and therefore the potential change, the potential redefinition.” Rem Koolhaas

6. “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

7. “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

8. “Manhattan is an accumulation of possible disasters that never happen.” Rem Koolhaas

9. “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

10. “Infrastructure is much more important than architecture.” Rem Koolhaas

11. “We live in an almost perfect stillness and work with incredible urgency.” Rem Koolhaas

12. “Find optimism in the inevitable.” Rem Koolhaas

13. “The Grid makes the history of architecture and all previous lessons of urbanism irrelevant. It forces Manhattan’s builders to develop a new system of formal values, to invent strategies for the distinction of one block from another. The Grid’s two-dimensional discipline also creates undreamt-of freedom for three-dimensional anarchy. The Grid defines a new balance between control and de-control in which the city can be at the same time ordered and fluid, a metropolis of rigid chaos.” Rem Koolhaas

14. “Why I talked about political correctness: the colonial is now such a major taboo that any achievement of the colonial period, or any generosity implied in colonialism, is again fundamentally neglected or fundamentally not recognised. That’s crazy, because history is a series of layers, and you cannot say, “This layer I support and this layer I cancel.” History is history and you cannot retrospectively manipulate it.” Rem Koolhaas

15. “One cannot completely avoid this landmark character with large buildings such as these. But the city itself is also gigantic.” Rem Koolhaas

16. “Sustainability has become an ornament.” Rem Koolhaas

17. “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

18. “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

19. “Let’s put it this way: One can be happy or unhappy in a building. But some buildings make us more depressed than others.” Rem Koolhaas

20. “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

21. “There are essentially two possibilities. One is to be, shall we say, an average architect and do the same thing everywhere. The other is to let yourself be inspired and even changed by the unique qualities of the place where you’re building. We always try to take the second approach.” Rem Koolhaas

22. “It is not possible to live in this age if you don’t have a sense of many contradictory forces.” Rem Koolhaas

23. “Architecture is a dangerous mix of power and importance.” Rem Koolhaas

24. “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

25. “Our society can no longer tolerate ugliness. You see that in cars, sofas and women. But ugliness also has a right to exist.” Rem Koolhaas

26. “The stronger the identity, the more it imprisons, the more it resists expansion, interpretation, renewal, contradiction.” Rem Koolhaas

27. “In a script, you have to link various episodes together, you have to generate suspense and you have to assemble things – through editing, for example. It’s exactly the same in architecture. Architects also put together spatial episodes to make sequences.” Rem Koolhaas

28. “The acceptance of certain realities doesn’t preclude idealism. It can lead to certain breakthroughs.” Rem Koolhaas

29. “Talk about beauty and you get boring answers, but talk about ugliness and things get interesting.” Rem Koolhaas

30. “Not many architects have the luxury to reject significant things.” Rem Koolhaas

31. “Escape from the architecture ghetto is one of the major drivers and has been from the very beginning.” Rem Koolhaas

32. “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

33. “All important architecture of the last century was strongly influenced by political systems. Look at the Soviet system, with its constructivism and Stalinism, Weimer with its Modern style, Mussolini and, of course, the Nazis and Albert Speer’s colossal structures. Today’s architecture is subservient to the market and its terms. The market has supplanted ideology. Architecture has turned into a spectacle. It has to package itself and no longer has significance as anything but a landmark.” Rem Koolhaas

34. “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

35. “There’s something really interesting about current urbanism: the only model is the universal model, and there is increasingly incapacity to consider the virtues and the qualities that are there, and then to build on them. The only thing is complete transformation.” Rem Koolhaas

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Check Out Rem Koolhaas interview (1994) – The Best Documentary Ever:

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