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"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."
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"Every man's work, whether it be literature, or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself."
"I was planning to go into architecture. But when I arrived, architecture was filled up. Acting was right next to it, so I signed up for acting instead."
"We shape our buildings thereafter they shape us."
"Rather than wait to see what the day or future holds, why not design and plan the future you want to experience?"
"Modern architecture predominately specializes in designing what are essentially dimly lit caves."
"We shape our buildings, thereafter they shape us."
"Nothing - really, absolutely nothing - says more about Victorian Britain and its capacity for brilliance than that the century's most daring and iconic building was entrusted to a gardener."
"If you put enough closets together, you have enough space for a room. If you put enough rooms together, you have enough room for a house. If you put enough houses together, you have space for a town, then a city, then a nation, then a world."
"The reality of the building does not consist in the roof and walls but in the space within to be lived in."
"It seems a fantastic paradox, but it is nevertheless a most important truth, that no architecture can be truly noble which is not imperfect."
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."
"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."
"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."
"Designs are increasingly winning competitions because they are literally green, and because somewhere they feature a small windmill."
"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."
"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."
"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."
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