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"Any architectural project we do takes at least four or five years, so increasingly there is a discrepancy between the acceleration of culture and the continuing slowness of architecture."
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"We shape our buildings, thereafter they shape us."
"Switzerland is a small, steep country, much more up and down than sideways, and is all stuck over with large brown hotels built on the cuckoo clock style of architecture."
"There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds."
"Architecture has recorded the great ideas of the human race. Not only every religious symbol, but every human thought has its page in that vast book."
"The terrifying and edible beauty of Art Nouveau architecture."
"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."
"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."
"All architecture is great architecture after sunset; perhaps architecture is really a nocturnal art, like the art of fireworks."
"It seems a fantastic paradox, but it is nevertheless a most important truth, that no architecture can be truly noble which is not imperfect."
"Modern architecture predominately specializes in designing what are essentially dimly lit caves."
Explore more quotes by Rem Koolhaas
"The areas of consensus shift unbelievably fast; the bubbles of certainty are constantly exploding."
"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."
"I'd say that my profession ends where architectural thinking ends - architectural thinking in terms of thinking about programs and organizational structure. These abstractions play a role in many other disciplines, and those disciplines are now defining their 'architectures' as well."
"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."
"Escape from the architecture ghetto is one of the major drivers and has been from the very beginning."
"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."
"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."
"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."
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