Quotes from Rem Koolhaas

The areas of consensus shift unbelievably fast; the bubbles of certainty are constantly exploding.

The 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.

That has been my entire life story, running against the current and running with the current. Sometimes running with the current is underestimated.

Our society can no longer tolerate ugliness. You see that in cars, sofas and women. [But] ugliness also has a right to exist.

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.

Influence is a very unpleasant subject and I deal with it in a maybe irresponsible way, which is to really ignore it. It would be a nightmare if we started to really think about it; it would tie our hands, it would tie everyone else's hands.

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.

The work in S, M, L, XL was almost suicidal. It required so much effort that our office almost went bankrupt.

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.

It is not possible to live in this age if you don't have a sense of many contradictory forces.

We live in an almost perfect stillness and work with incredible urgency.

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.

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.

Talk about beauty and you get boring answers, but talk about ugliness and things get interesting.

There's nothing Dutch about my architecture.

The good is not a category that interests me.

Our office acts like a kind of educational establishment and we are very careful who we educate.