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" 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. "

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" Miami Beach is a completely interesting hybrid because it is, on the one hand, a resort and, on the other hand, a real city. This condition of city and water on two sides I think is really amazing. And in the heart of that city, it has put an enormous convention center, an enormous physical presence. "

Rem Koolhaas

Heart

City

Beach

" There's nothing Dutch about my architecture. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

Rem Koolhaas

Who

Office

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

" Infrastructure is much more important than architecture. "

Rem Koolhaas

Much

Architecture

" 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. "

" The acceptance of certain realities doesn't preclude idealism. It can lead to certain breakthroughs. "

" Not many architects have the luxury to reject significant things. "

" 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

Weird

Weather

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" We live in an almost perfect stillness and work with incredible urgency. "

" When air conditioning, escalators, and advertising appeared, shopping expanded its scale, but also limited its spontaneity. And it became much more predictable, almost scientific. What had once been the most surprising became the most manipulated. "

Rem Koolhaas

Almost

Air

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "