Rem Koolhaas
Rem Koolhaas
Remment Lucas "Rem" Koolhaasis a Dutch architect, architectural theorist, urbanist and Professor in Practice of Architecture and Urban Design at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University. Koolhaas studied at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London and at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Koolhaas is the founding partner of OMA, and of its research-oriented counterpart AMO based in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. In 2005, he co-founded Volume Magazine together with Mark Wigley and Ole Bouman...
NationalityDutch
ProfessionArchitect
Date of Birth17 November 1944
CityRotterdam, Netherlands
It is not possible to live in this age if you don't have a sense of many contradictory forces.
The stronger the identity, the more it imprisons, the more it resists expansion, interpretation, renewal, contradiction.
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.
That has been my entire life story. Running against the current and running with the current. Sometimes running with the current is underestimated. The acceptance of certain realities doesn’t preclude idealism. It can lead to certain breakthroughs.
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.
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.
That has been another interesting discovery: that basically a city [Lagos] could recover from a really deep, deep, deep pit.
Asia is still dominated by skyscrapers. I hope that, in European cities, it will become a declining trend. They were almost never necessary.
Our office acts like a kind of educational establishment and we are very careful who we educate.
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.
Prada is extremely directed in terms of communicating what they like and what they don't like. That is actually extremely pleasant because it clarifies very easily what you can do and what you need to do.
We live in an almost perfect stillness and work with incredible urgency.
Designs are increasingly winning competitions because they are literally green, and because somewhere they feature a small windmill.