Talk about beauty and you get boring answers, but talk about ugliness and things get interesting.
Rem KoolhaasIf you have this reputation you can sit back and endure it, or you can try to do things with it.
Rem KoolhaasIn 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 KoolhaasThe 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 KoolhaasArchitecture 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 KoolhaasAt that time [90th in Lagos], if you drove through the city, you drove through a foreground that always seemed to be incredibly dramatic and incredibly agonised - smoking, burning, incredible compression. In the first year we stayed on the ground and went everywhere. But then in order to discover whether this was the whole story, we rented a helicopter. And we began to understand that this is not chaos but a highly modern system that had been abandoned, then at some point went into reversal, then slowly came out of it.
Rem Koolhaas