Rem Koolhaas

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

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“Miami Beach is a completely interesting hybrid because it is, on the one hand, a resort and, on the other hand, a real city. This condition of city and water on two sides I think is really amazing. And in the heart of that city, it has put an enormous convention center, an enormous physical presence.”

“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.”

“As an architect, I always have mixed feelings. On the one hand, your fingers are itching. As a human being, you are happy to participate in the indolence.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I am incredibly bad at predicting the future; I am only smart enough to observe the present and listen to my intuition about tendencies.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

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

“That has been my entire life story, running against the current and running with the current. Sometimes running with the current is underestimated.”