Rem Koolhaas

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

“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.”

“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.”

“The acceptance of certain realities doesn't preclude idealism. It can lead to certain breakthroughs.”

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

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

“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.”

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

“Infrastructure is much more important than architecture.”

“Journalists seem mostly interested in what brand of shoes I wear.”

“Nobody should be anything, but because I once had a different profession and I'm interested in writing, I took it upon me.”

“The word 'celebrity' and the word 'architect' are basically incompatible.”

“There's nothing Dutch about my architecture.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“Architecture is a rare collective profession: it's always exercised by groups. There is an essential modesty, which is a complete contradiction to the notion of a star.”

“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.”

“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.”