132 Quotes by Rem Koolhaas

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

There’s nothing Dutch about my architecture.

Find optimism in the inevitable.

Each building has to be beautiful, but cheap and fast, but it lasts forever. That is already an incredible battery of seemingly contradictory demands. So yes, I’m definitely perhaps contradictory person, but I operate in very contradictory times.

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

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.

There are books that I own that somehow even without reading them they mean something to me. So I think people have a relationship with books in a library whether you’ve come specifically to read them or not.

I wanted to disconnect from contemporary architecture.

When we went in the late 1990s, Nigeria was still in a dictatorship. So we didn’t go with a mission. It started really with a sort of blankness and open-endedness.