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

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.
Rem Koolhaas

Designs are increasingly winning competitions because they are literally green, and because somewhere they feature a small windmill.
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.
Rem Koolhaas

Escape from the architecture ghetto is one of the major drivers and has been from the very beginning.
Rem Koolhaas

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

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.
Rem Koolhaas

If you have this reputation you can sit back and endure it, or you can try to do things with it.
Rem Koolhaas

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.
Rem Koolhaas

It is not possible to live in this age if you don't have a sense of many contradictory forces.
Rem Koolhaas


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.
Rem Koolhaas

Not many architects have the luxury to reject significant things.
Rem Koolhaas

One of our theories is that one can offset this excessive compulsion toward the spectacular with a return to simplicity.
Rem Koolhaas

Our office acts like a kind of educational establishment and we are very careful who we educate.
Rem Koolhaas

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

Prada is extremely directed in terms of communicating what they like and what they don't like. That is actually extremely pleasant because it clarifies very easily what you can do and what you need to do.
Rem Koolhaas

The areas of consensus shift unbelievably fast; the bubbles of certainty are constantly exploding.
Rem Koolhaas

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

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

The luxury of our position now is that we can almost assemble any team to address any issue.
Rem Koolhaas