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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.

-Rem Koolhaas

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Any Architectural Project We

Rem Koolhaas

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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.

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The Architecture Per Se Isn't At Fault. The More Important Factor, In My View, Is The Political Neglect Of These Areas, Which Have Essentially Been Cut Off From Other Neighborhoods.

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

Beauty Isn't What I'm Primarily Interested In [in Architecture]. I Think Appropriateness Is More Important.

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.

As More And More Architecture Is Finally Unmasked As The Mere Organization Of Flow - Shopping Centers, Airports - It Is Evident That Circulation Is What Makes Or Breaks Public Architecture.

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

The Work In S, M, L, Xl Was Almost Suicidal. It Required So Much Effort That Our Office Almost Went Bankrupt.

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.

Discrepancies Between

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.

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

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.

Lagos Was A City That Had Been Turned Against Itself. There Was A Bridge That Became The Perfect Trap For Crimes, Which Began With Nails Being Scattered To Cause Flat Tyres. If The Driver Stopped, The Car Would Be Dismantled In 20 Minutes And The Parts Thrown Overboard [to People Waiting Below]. The System Had Turned Into A Kind Of Destructive Device That Could Be Used Against People. That Was The Narrative.

Talk About Beauty And You Get Boring Answers, But Talk About Ugliness And Things Get Interesting.

There Are Essentially Two Possibilities. One Is To Be, Shall We Say, An Average Architect And Do The Same Thing Everywhere. The Other Is To Let Yourself Be Inspired And Even Changed By The Unique Qualities Of The Place Where You're Building. We Always Try To Take The Second Approach.

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There's Nothing Dutch About My Architecture.

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.

The Stronger The Identity, The More It Imprisons, The More It Resists Expansion, Interpretation, Renewal, Contradiction.

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

Manhattan Has Generated A Shameless Architecture That Has Been Loved In Direct Proportion To Its Defiant Lack Of Self-hatred, Has Been Respected Exactly To The Degree That It Went Too Far.

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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.

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.

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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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.

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Criticism Per Se Does Not Worry Me. I've Always Solicited It As Part Of The Design Process.

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