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All Important Architecture Of The Last Century Was Strongly Influenced By Political Systems. Look At The Soviet System, With Its Constructivism And Stalinism, Weimer With Its Modern Style, Mussolini And, Of Course, The Nazis And Albert Speer's Colossal Structures. Today's Architecture Is Subservient To The Market And Its Terms. The Market Has Supplanted Ideology. Architecture Has Turned Into A Spectacle. It Has To Package Itself And No Longer Has Significance As Anything But A Landmark.

-Rem Koolhaas

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All Important Architecture Of

Rem Koolhaas

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All Important Architecture Of The Last Century Was Strongly Influenced By Political Systems. Look At The Soviet System, With Its Constructivism And Stalinism, Weimer With Its Modern Style, Mussolini And, Of Course, The Nazis And Albert Speer's Colossal Structures. Today's Architecture Is Subservient To The Market And Its Terms. The Market Has Supplanted Ideology. Architecture Has Turned Into A Spectacle. It Has To Package Itself And No Longer Has Significance As Anything But A Landmark.

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The Beauty Of My Profession [architecture] Lies In Its Randomness And Surprise. And Don't Think I Can Choose My Projects. I Have To Build What's Offered To Me.

You Need To Look At Inequality As A Typical Condition Of Modern Society.

We Know That Las Vegas Is Junk, But At The Same Time I Think That Exactly The Same Process And Ultimately Also, Perhaps The Same Logic, Attaches Itself To Or Underlies Our Masterpieces. We Live In An Amazing Era When In Spite Of An Absence Of Masters There Is An Explosion Of Masterpieces.

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There's Nothing Dutch About My Architecture.

Japan Lives With Drastic Segregation Between The Sublime, The Ugly, And The Utterly Without Qualities. Dominance Of The Last 2 Categories Makes Mere Presence Of The First Stunning: When Beauty 'happens', It Is Absolutely Surprising.

Our Office Acts Like A Kind Of Educational Establishment And We Are Very Careful Who We Educate.

That Has Been My Entire Life Story. Running Against The Current And Running With The Current. Sometimes Running With The Current Is Underestimated. The Acceptance Of Certain Realities Doesn’t Preclude Idealism. It Can Lead To Certain Breakthroughs.

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.

Our Society Can No Longer Tolerate Ugliness. You See That In Cars, Sofas And Women. [but] Ugliness Also Has A Right To Exist.

Journalists Seem Mostly Interested In What Brand Of Shoes I Wear.

It Is Not Possible To Live In This Age If You Don't Have A Sense Of Many Contradictory Forces.

In A Script, You Have To Link Various Episodes Together, You Have To Generate Suspense And You Have To Assemble Things - Through Editing, For Example. It's Exactly The Same In Architecture. Architects Also Put Together Spatial Episodes To Make Sequences.

One Cannot Completely Avoid This Landmark Character With Large Buildings Such As These. But The City Itself Is Also Gigantic.

The Institutions Are Working Better Now, The Banks Are Much More Functional. At This Time, 1997, There Were No Mobile Phones! It's A Whole Different Thing Now With Mobile Phones: Technology Has Created A Form Of Regulation, Because People Can Actually Talk To Each Other A Lot More.

Nobody Should Be Anything, But Because I Once Had A Different Profession And I'm Interested In Writing, I Took It Upon Me.

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.

That Has Been Another Interesting Discovery: That Basically A City [lagos] Could Recover From A Really Deep, Deep, Deep Pit.

Nigeria [in 1990] Was All Rumour, An Unbelievable Amount Of Rumour - Largely About Crime And Almost Mythical Manifestations Of Evil.

Nigeria Was A Blank On The Map - There Weren't Even Any Maps. The Us State Department, Everyone Said Don't Go There. It Was Courageous Of Harvard University: The Notion Was That We Would Match Harvard Students With Nigerian Students, So That Every Student Would Have A Guide, Creating A Guarantee Of Intimacy With The City.

Most Old Cities Are Now Sclerotic Machines That Dispense Known Qualities In Ever-greater Quantities, Instead Of Laboratories Of The Uncertain. Only The Skyscraper Offers Business The Wide-open Spaces Of A Man-made Wild West, A Frontier In The Sky.

Let's Put It This Way: One Can Be Happy Or Unhappy In A Building. But Some Buildings Make Us More Depressed Than Others.

Designs Are Increasingly Winning Competitions Because They Are Literally Green, And Because Somewhere They Feature A Small Windmill.

In This Branch Of Utopian Real Estate, Architecture Is No Longer The Art Of Designing Buildings So Much As The Brutal Skyward Extrusion Of Whatever Site The Developer Has Managed To Assemble.

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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.

At That Time [90th In Lagos], If You Drove Through The City, You Drove Through A Foreground That Always Seemed To Be Incredibly Dramatic And Incredibly Agonised - Smoking, Burning, Incredible Compression. In The First Year We Stayed On The Ground And Went Everywhere. But Then In Order To Discover Whether This Was The Whole Story, We Rented A Helicopter. And We Began To Understand That This Is Not Chaos But A Highly Modern System That Had Been Abandoned, Then At Some Point Went Into Reversal, Then Slowly Came Out Of It.

Lagos Has Also Had A Particular Effect On My Career. I Was There Early, And Although It Was A Courageous Step To Go There And Invest On This Scale - I Went There Maybe 20 Times - It's Also Been Also Super-controversial. There's An Old School Of Thought That Somebody Like Me Has No Place To Go There.because Of Colonialism And So On.

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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 Elses Hands.

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The Word 'celebrity' And The Word 'architect' Are Basically Incompatible.

Sustainability Has Become An Ornament.

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Asia Is Still Dominated By Skyscrapers. I Hope That, In European Cities, It Will Become A Declining Trend. They Were Almost Never Necessary.

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Manhattan Is An Accumulation Of Possible Disasters That Never Happen.

I Studied In London In 1968. Our School Had A Separate Department Of Tropical Architecture. Of Course It Was Totally Unfashionable, Partly Because Nobody Wanted To Think About Colonialism, But Basically What You Learned There Was That, Ok, The Sun Is Here, So You Should Create Natural Ventilation Here - An Unbelievable Amount Of Really Sound Principles That Have Been Completely Abandoned, So Now Everything Is Air Conditioned With Big Machines.

The Metropolis Strives To Reach A Mythical Point Where The World Is Completely Fabricated By Man, So That It Absolutely Coincides With His Desires.

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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 Areas Of Consensus Shift Unbelievably Fast; The Bubbles Of Certainty Are Constantly Exploding.

The Good Is Not A Category That Interests Me.

In The End, There Will Be Little Else For Us To Do But Shop.

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Discrepancies Between

If You Have This Reputation You Can Sit Back And Endure It, Or You Can Try To Do Things With It.

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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.

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