One of our theories is that one can offset this excessive compulsion toward the spectacular with a return to simplicity. Rem Koolhaas More Quotes by Rem Koolhaas More Quotes From Rem Koolhaas Let's put it this way: One can be happy or unhappy in a building. But some buildings make us more depressed than others. Rem Koolhaas building unhappy way Our office acts like a kind of educational establishment and we are very careful who we educate. Rem Koolhaas office kind education I studied in London in 1968. Our school had a separate department of tropical architecture. Of course it was totally unfashionable, partly because nobody wanted to think about colonialism, but basically what you learned there was that, OK, the sun is here, so you should create natural ventilation here - an unbelievable amount of really sound principles that have been completely abandoned, so now everything is air conditioned with big machines. Rem Koolhaas air school thinking I think one of the important evolutions is that we no longer feel compulsively the need to argue, or to justify things on a kind of rational level. We are much more willing to admit that certain things are completely instinctive and others are really intellectual. Rem Koolhaas important intellectual thinking The thing is that I have a really intense, almost compulsive need to record. But it doesn't end there, because what I record is somehow transformed into a creative thing. There is a continuity. Recording is the beginning of a conceptual production. I am somehow collapsing the two - recording and producing - into a single event. Rem Koolhaas events creative two 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. Rem Koolhaas quality cities identity Escape from the architecture ghetto is one of the major drivers and has been from the very beginning. Rem Koolhaas drivers ghetto architecture The people from the suburbs are bringing along their suburban values: cleanliness, orderliness, safety - dullness, in other words. As a result, urban areas are being hollowed out. Just look at Times Square in New York. No more sex shops, no drugs, no homeless people. The area is clinically clean and incredibly dull. Rem Koolhaas squares new-york sex The Metropolis strives to reach a mythical point where the world is completely fabricated by man, so that it absolutely coincides with his desires. Rem Koolhaas desire men world The work in S, M, L, XL was almost suicidal. It required so much effort that our office almost went bankrupt. Rem Koolhaas suicidal office suicide 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. Rem Koolhaas batteries forever beautiful That has been another interesting discovery: that basically a city [Lagos] could recover from a really deep, deep, deep pit. Rem Koolhaas cities discovery interesting Lagos was not very inviting even to Lagosians. It was considered a no-go zone, almost in its entirety. Rem Koolhaas entirety inviting zone Evil can also be beautiful. The Coliseum in Rome, for example, a wonderful structure with an awful past. Just think about the bloody gladiator fights there. Rem Koolhaas fighting beautiful past I am incredibly bad at predicting the future; I am only smart enough to observe the present and listen to my intuition about tendencies. Rem Koolhaas intuition smart enough If you have this reputation you can sit back and endure it, or you can try to do things with it. Rem Koolhaas endure reputation trying Lagos has also had a particular effect on my career. I was there early, and although it was a courageous step to go there and invest on this scale - I went there maybe 20 times - it's also been also super-controversial. There's an old school of thought that somebody like me has no place to go there.Because of colonialism and so on. Rem Koolhaas colonialism careers school The architecture per se isn't at fault. The more important factor, in my view, is the political neglect of these areas, which have essentially been cut off from other neighborhoods. Rem Koolhaas cutting political views Lagos was the ultimate dysfunctional city - but actually, in terms of all the initiatives and ingenuity, it mobilised an incredibly beautiful, almost utopian landscape of independence and agency. Rem Koolhaas agency cities beautiful The real thing we tried to look at is what happens to a society when the state is absent. At that point, the state had really withdrawn from Lagos; the city was left to its own devices, both in terms of money and services. That, by definition, created an unbelievable proliferation of independent agency: each citizen needed to take, in any day, maybe 400 or 500 independent decisions on how to survive that extremely complex system. Rem Koolhaas agency independent real
