Top 70 Rem Koolhaas Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Architecture is a dangerous mix of power and importance.”

— Rem Koolhaas

2. “Find optimism in the inevitable.”

— Rem Koolhaas

3. “Sustainability has become an ornament.”

— Rem Koolhaas

4. “The City is an addictive machine from which there is no escape.”

— Rem Koolhaas

5. “Infrastructure is much more important than architecture.”

— Rem Koolhaas

6. “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

7. “The good is not a category that interests me.”

— Rem Koolhaas

8. “I wanted to disconnect from contemporary architecture.”

— Rem Koolhaas

9. “If less is more, maybe nothing is everything.”

— Rem Koolhaas

10. “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

11. “The stronger the identity, the more it imprisons, the more it resists expansion, interpretation, renewal, contradiction.”

— Rem Koolhaas

12. “It is not possible to live in this age if you don’t have a sense of many contradictory forces.”

— Rem Koolhaas

13. “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

14. “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

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

— Rem Koolhaas

16. “As more and more architecture is finally unmasked as the mere organization of flow – shopping centers, airports – it is evident that circulation is what makes or breaks public architecture...”

— Rem Koolhaas

17. “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

18. “Talk about beauty and you get boring answers, but talk about ugliness and things get interesting.”

— Rem Koolhaas

19. “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

20. “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

21. “The acceptance of certain realities doesn’t preclude idealism. It can lead to certain breakthroughs.”

— Rem Koolhaas

22. “Not many architects have the luxury to reject significant things.”

— Rem Koolhaas

23. “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

24. “The work in S, M, L, XL was almost suicidal. It required so much effort that our office almost went bankrupt.”

— Rem Koolhaas

25. “Most old cities are now sclerotic machines that dispense known qualities in ever-greater quantities, instead of laboratories of the uncertain. Only the skyscraper offers business the wide-open spaces of a man-made Wild West, a frontier in the sky.”

— Rem Koolhaas

26. “The word ‘celebrity’ and the word ‘architect’ are basically incompatible.”

— Rem Koolhaas

27. “In the end, there will be little else for us to do but shop.”

— Rem Koolhaas

28. “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

29. “Designs are increasingly winning competitions because they are literally green, and because somewhere they feature a small windmill.”

— Rem Koolhaas

30. “We live in an almost perfect stillness and work with incredible urgency.”

— Rem Koolhaas

31. “Criticism per se does not worry me. I’ve always solicited it as part of the design process.”

— Rem Koolhaas

32. “Nobody should be anything, but because I once had a different profession and I’m interested in writing, I took it upon me.”

— Rem Koolhaas

33. “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

34. “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

35. “In this branch of utopian real estate, architecture is no longer the art of designing buildings so much as the brutal skyward extrusion of whatever site the developer has managed to assemble.”

— Rem Koolhaas

36. “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

37. “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

38. “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.”

— Rem Koolhaas

39. “You need to look at inequality as a typical condition of modern society.”

— Rem Koolhaas

40. “Manhattan is an accumulation of possible disasters that never happen.”

— Rem Koolhaas

41. “Manhattan has generated a shameless architecture that has been loved in direct proportion to its defiant lack of self-hatred, hasbeen respected exactly to the degree that it went too far.”

— Rem Koolhaas

42. “Lagos was not very inviting even to Lagosians. It was considered a no-go zone, almost in its entirety.”

— Rem Koolhaas

43. “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

44. “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

45. “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

46. “That has been my entire life story. Running against the current and running with the current. Sometimes running with the current is underestimated. The acceptance of certain realities doesn’t preclude idealism. It can lead to certain breakthroughs.”

— Rem Koolhaas

47. “I like fashion, whether or not it’s overpriced, because it creates a sense of the sublime with relatively few means.”

— Rem Koolhaas

48. “In a script, you have to link various episodes together, you have to generate suspense and you have to assemble things – through editing, for example. It’s exactly the same in architecture. Architects also put together spatial episodes to make sequences.”

— Rem Koolhaas

49. “There’s nothing Dutch about my architecture.”

— Rem Koolhaas

50. “There is no plateau of resting or stabilising. Once you are interested in how things evolve, you have a kind of never-ending perspective, because it means you are interested in articulating the evolution, and therefore the potential change, the potential redefinition.”

— Rem Koolhaas