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"Each building has to be beautiful, but cheap and fast, but it lasts forever. That is already an incredible battery of seemingly contradictory demands. So yes, I'm definitely perhaps contradictory person, but I operate in very contradictory times."
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"The pattern of things was that each of the research students would be doing some particular experiment on the accelerator, often involving the building of counters or a system like that."
"Barry and I were in the middle of building a house, and I was in the midst of having a nervous breakdown, because that's what you do when you build a house."
"I myself am a builder and get totally excited about building Yahoo! as a brand and building it into a bigger and better company. That's what I intend to do."
"It was very unusual to employ prettiness as part of a building."
"I've been doing a lot of learning from mistakes, first and foremost, and building off that."
"All alone in a committee room of the Senate Office Building in Washington, I was reading the dry typewritten pages in an unpublished report of an almost forgotten congressional committee hearing."
"You get the best effort from others not by lighting a fire beneath them, but by building a fire within."
Explore more quotes by Rem Koolhaas
"The work in S, M, L, XL was almost suicidal. It required so much effort that our office almost went bankrupt."
"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."
"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."
"If you have this reputation you can sit back and endure it, or you can try to do things with it."
"When air conditioning, escalators, and advertising appeared, shopping expanded its scale, but also limited its spontaneity. And it became much more predictable, almost scientific. What had once been the most surprising became the most manipulated."
"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."
"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."
"One of our theories is that one can offset this excessive compulsion toward the spectacular with a return to simplicity."
"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."
"The areas of consensus shift unbelievably fast; the bubbles of certainty are constantly exploding."
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