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"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."
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"It seems a fantastic paradox, but it is nevertheless a most important truth, that no architecture can be truly noble which is not imperfect."
"The way of architecture is the quiet voice that underlies it and has guided it from the beginning."
"Architecture doesn't come from theory. You don't think your way through a building."
"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 Egyptian contribution to architecture was more concerned with remembering the dead than the living."
"I see architecture not as Gropius did, as a moral venture, as truth, but as invention, in the same way that poetry or music or painting is invention."
"Winning a competition in architecture is a ticket to oblivion. It's just an idea. Ninety-nine per cent never get built."
"I acquired an admiration for Japanese culture, art, and architecture, and learned of the existence of the game of GO, which I still play."
"Japanese architecture is very much copied in this country and in Europe."
"Architecture is involved with the world, but at the same time it has a certain autonomy. This autonomy cannot be explained in terms of traditional logic because the most interesting parts of the work are non-verbal. They operate within the terms of the work, like any art."
Explore more quotes by Rem Koolhaas
"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."
"If you have this reputation you can sit back and endure it, or you can try to do things with it."
"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."
"Designs are increasingly winning competitions because they are literally green, and because somewhere they feature a small windmill."
"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."
"The areas of consensus shift unbelievably fast; the bubbles of certainty are constantly exploding."
"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."
"The luxury of our position now is that we can almost assemble any team to address any issue."
"But now sustainability is such a political category that it's getting more and more difficult to think about it in a serious way. Sustainability has become an ornament."
"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."
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