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
The word 'celebrity' and the word 'architect' are basically incompatible.
I wanted to disconnect from contemporary architecture
The work in S, M, L, XL was almost suicidal. It required so much effort that our office almost went bankrupt.
The luxury of our position now is that we can almost assemble any team to address any issue.
The City is an addictive machine from which there is no escape
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.
If you have this reputation you can sit back and endure it, or you can try to do things with it.
Architecture is a dangerous mix of power and importance.
The acceptance of certain realities doesn't preclude idealism. It can lead to certain breakthroughs.
The areas of consensus shift unbelievably fast; the bubbles of certainty are constantly exploding.
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.
Let's put it this way: One can be happy or unhappy in a building. But some buildings make us more depressed than others.
Evil can also be beautiful. The Coliseum in Rome, for example, a wonderful structure with an awful past. Just think about the bloody gladiator fights there.
I like fashion, whether or not it's overpriced, because it creates a sense of the sublime with relatively few means.