Rem Koolhaas
Rem Koolhaas
Remment Lucas "Rem" Koolhaasis a Dutch architect, architectural theorist, urbanist and Professor in Practice of Architecture and Urban Design at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University. Koolhaas studied at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London and at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Koolhaas is the founding partner of OMA, and of its research-oriented counterpart AMO based in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. In 2005, he co-founded Volume Magazine together with Mark Wigley and Ole Bouman...
NationalityDutch
ProfessionArchitect
Date of Birth17 November 1944
CityRotterdam, Netherlands
The real thing we tried to look at is what happens to a society when the state is absent. At that point, the state had really withdrawn from Lagos; the city was left to its own devices, both in terms of money and services. That, by definition, created an unbelievable proliferation of independent agency: each citizen needed to take, in any day, maybe 400 or 500 independent decisions on how to survive that extremely complex system.
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.
The work in S,M,L,XL was almost suicidal. It required so much effort that our office almost went bankrupt.
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.
We felt it was very important for an entity like CCTV to make its presence felt... To generate a space and to define a space, that is the main thing.
One of our theories is that one can offset this excessive compulsion toward the spectacular with a return to simplicity.
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.
Manhattan has no choice but the skyward extrusion of the Grid itself; only the Skyscraper offers business the wide-open spaces of a man-made Wild West, a frontier in the sky.
The luxury of our position now is that we can almost assemble any team to address any issue.
I wanted to disconnect from contemporary architecture
Manhattan is an accumulation of possible disasters that never happen.
Without a tighter union, Europe will disintegrate
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....
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.