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
One of our theories is that one can offset this excessive compulsion toward the spectacular with a return to simplicity.
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.
We felt it was very important for an entity like CCTV to make its presence felt... To generate a space and to define a space, that is the main thing.
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.
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.
Not many architects have the luxury to reject significant things.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Japan lives with drastic segregation between the sublime, the ugly, and the utterly without qualities. Dominance of the last 2 categories makes mere presence of the first stunning: when beauty 'happens', it is absolutely surprising.
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.