Rem Koolhaas Quotes
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Architecture is a dangerous mix of power and importance.
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The City is an addictive machine from which there is no escape
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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.
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Architecture is a hazardous mixture of omnipotence and impotence. It is by definition a c h a o t i c a d v e n t u r e... In other words, the utopian enterprise.
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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.
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Talk about beauty and you get boring answers, but talk about ugliness and things get interesting.
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It is not possible to live in this age if you don't have a sense of many contradictory forces.
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The stronger the identity, the more it imprisons, the more it resists expansion, interpretation, renewal, contradiction.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Criticism per se does not worry me. I've always solicited it as part of the design process.
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The good is not a category that interests me.
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Find optimism in the inevitable.