13 Quotes & Sayings By Rem Koolhaas

Rem Koolhaas (born February 27, 1941 in Rotterdam, Netherlands) is a Dutch architect and urban planner. He is the son of the Dutch architect Winy Maas and the brother of the architecture theorist and critic Dirk Koolhaas. He studied architecture at Delft University of Technology, graduating in 1963. Between 1964 and 1966 he worked as a trainee at his father's office Read more

In 1966 he founded his own office, OMA (OO-ma), through which he has designed many public projects, including the CCTV Headquarters in Beijing (1995–2001), The Gate Pavilion in Moscow (2001–2003). In 2002, Koolhaas staged One World Trade Center as part of the 9/11 Memorial Museum, which he also designed. In 2007, he was awarded the Pritzker Architecture Prize for his work on CCTV Headquarters.

In 2013, Koolhaas was awarded an honorary doctorate from the Faculty of Architecture at Delft University of Technology.

1
Asia is still dominated by skyscrapers. I hope that, in European cities, it will become a declining trend. They were almost never necessary. Rem Koolhaas
2
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. Rem Koolhaas
3
Infrastructure is much more important than architecture. Rem Koolhaas
4
What is now called 'green architecture' is an opportunistic caricature of a much deeper consideration of the issues related to sustainability that architecture has been engaged with for many years. It was one of the first professions that was deeply concerned with these issues and that had an intellectual response to them. Rem Koolhaas
5
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. Rem Koolhaas
6
Not many architects have the luxury to reject significant things. Rem Koolhaas
7
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. Rem Koolhaas
8
Escape from the architecture ghetto is one of the major drivers and has been from the very beginning. Rem Koolhaas
9
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. Rem Koolhaas
10
Architecture is a rare collective profession: it's always exercised by groups. There is an essential modesty, which is a complete contradiction to the notion of a star. Rem Koolhaas
11
There's nothing Dutch about my architecture. Rem Koolhaas
12
Designs are increasingly winning competitions because they are literally green, and because somewhere they feature a small windmill. Rem Koolhaas