When we went in the late 1990s, Nigeria was still in a dictatorship. So we didn't go with a mission. It started really with a sort of blankness and open-endedness. Rem Koolhaas More Quotes by Rem Koolhaas More Quotes From Rem Koolhaas A building has at least two lives - the one imagined by its maker and the life it lives afterward - and they are never the same. Rem Koolhaas building makers two Talk about beauty and you get boring answers, but talk about ugliness and things get interesting. Rem Koolhaas boring answers interesting Architects work in two ways. One is to respond precisely to a client's needs or demands. Another is to look at what the client asks and reinterpret it. Rem Koolhaas clients two way It is not possible to live in this age if you don't have a sense of many contradictory forces. Rem Koolhaas contradictory force age Architecture is a dangerous mix of power and importance. Rem Koolhaas bad-ass badass architecture The City is an addictive machine from which there is no escape Rem Koolhaas machines cities There are essentially two possibilities. One is to be, shall we say, an average architect and do the same thing everywhere. The other is to let yourself be inspired and even changed by the unique qualities of the place where you're building. We always try to take the second approach. Rem Koolhaas unique average two Find optimism in the inevitable. Rem Koolhaas inevitable optimism The great problem of the concert hall is that the shoebox is the ideal shape for acoustics but that no architect worth their names wants to build a shoebox. Rem Koolhaas shapes names want Architecture is a hazardous mixture of omnipotence and impotence. It is by definition a c h a o t i c a d v e n t u r e... In other words, the utopian enterprise. Rem Koolhaas omnipotence mixtures definitions All important architecture of the last century was strongly influenced by political systems. Look at the Soviet system, with its constructivism and Stalinism, Weimer with its Modern style, Mussolini and, of course, the Nazis and Albert Speer's colossal structures. Today's architecture is subservient to the market and its terms. The market has supplanted ideology. Architecture has turned into a spectacle. It has to package itself and no longer has significance as anything but a landmark. Rem Koolhaas style political important The good is not a category that interests me. Rem Koolhaas categories design interest Criticism per se does not worry me. I've always solicited it as part of the design process. Rem Koolhaas design-process criticism worry Manhattan is an accumulation of possible disasters that never happen. Rem Koolhaas manhattan accumulation disaster The stronger the identity, the more it imprisons, the more it resists expansion, interpretation, renewal, contradiction. Rem Koolhaas expansion stronger identity There's something really interesting about current urbanism: the only model is the universal model, and there is increasingly incapacity to consider the virtues and the qualities that are there, and then to build on them. The only thing is complete transformation. Rem Koolhaas transformation quality interesting Not many architects have the luxury to reject significant things. Rem Koolhaas significant-things luxury architecture 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 architecture people thinking Our society can no longer tolerate ugliness. You see that in cars, sofas and women. [But] ugliness also has a right to exist. Rem Koolhaas sofas our-society car Infrastructure is much more important than architecture. Rem Koolhaas infrastructure architecture important
