132 Quotes by Rem Koolhaas

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.

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.

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.

I think one of the important evolutions is that we no longer feel compulsively the need to argue, or to justify things on a kind of rational level. We are much more willing to admit that certain things are completely instinctive and others are really intellectual.

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.

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.

Not many architects have the luxury to reject significant things.

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.

I am incredibly bad at predicting the future; I am only smart enough to observe the present and listen to my intuition about tendencies.