Rem Koolhaas

“There's nothing Dutch about my architecture.”

“Designs are increasingly winning competitions because they are literally green, and because somewhere they feature a small windmill.”

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

“Architecture 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.”

“Infrastructure is much more important than architecture.”

“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.”

“Not many architects have the luxury to reject significant things.”

“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.”

“What is now called 'green architecture' is an opportunistic caricature of a much deeper consideration of the issues related to sustainability that architecture has been engaged with for many years. It was one of the first professions that was deeply concerned with these issues and that had an intellectual response to them.”

“People can inhabit anything. And they can be miserable in anything and ecstatic in anything. More and more I think that architecture has nothing to do with it. Of course, that's both liberating and alarming.”

“We say we want to create beauty, identity, quality, singularity. And yet, maybe in truth these cities that we have are desired. Maybe their very characterlessness provides the best context for living.”

“Escape from the architecture ghetto is one of the major drivers and has been from the very beginning.”