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 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.
One of our theories is that one can offset this excessive compulsion toward the spectacular with a return to simplicity.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Lagos was not very inviting even to Lagosians. It was considered a no-go zone, almost in its entirety.
Lagos was a city that had been turned against itself. There was a bridge that became the perfect trap for crimes, which began with nails being scattered to cause flat tyres. If the driver stopped, the car would be dismantled in 20 minutes and the parts thrown overboard [to people waiting below]. The system had turned into a kind of destructive device that could be used against people. That was the narrative.
When we went in the late 1990s, Nigeria was still in a dictatorship. So we didn't go with a mission. It started really with a sort of blankness and open-endedness.
Criticism per se does not worry me. I've always solicited it as part of the design process.
As more and more architecture is finally unmasked as the mere organization of flow—shopping centers, airports—it is evident that circulation is what makes or breaks public architecture....
Sustainability has become an ornament.
Manhattan is an accumulation of possible disasters that never happen.