Manhattan has generated a shameless architecture that has been loved in direct proportion to its defiant lack of self-hatred, has been respected exactly to the degree that it went too far.
Rem KoolhaasTalk about beauty and you get boring answers, but talk about ugliness and things get interesting.
Rem KoolhaasLet's put it this way: One can be happy or unhappy in a building. But some buildings make us more depressed than others.
Rem KoolhaasThe Grid makes the history of architecture and all previous lessons of urbanism irrelevant. It forces Manhattan's builders to develop a new system of formal values, to invent strategies for the distinction of one block from another. The Grid's two-dimensional discipline also creates undreamt-of freedom for three-dimensional anarchy. The Grid defines a new balance between control and de-control in which the city can be at the same time ordered and fluid, a metropolis of rigid chaos.
Rem Koolhaas