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The Grid Makes The History Of Architecture And All Previous Lessons Of Urbanism Irrelevant. It Forces Manhattan's Builders To Develop A New System Of Formal Values, To Invent Strategies For The Distinction Of One Block From Another. The Grid's Two-dimensional Discipline Also Creates Undreamt-of Freedom For Three-dimensional Anarchy. The Grid Defines A New Balance Between Control And De-control In Which The City Can Be At The Same Time Ordered And Fluid, A Metropolis Of Rigid Chaos.

-Rem Koolhaas

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The Grid Makes The

Rem Koolhaas

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The Grid Makes The History Of Architecture And All Previous Lessons Of Urbanism Irrelevant. It Forces Manhattan's Builders To Develop A New System Of Formal Values, To Invent Strategies For The Distinction Of One Block From Another. The Grid's Two-dimensional Discipline Also Creates Undreamt-of Freedom For Three-dimensional Anarchy. The Grid Defines A New Balance Between Control And De-control In Which The City Can Be At The Same Time Ordered And Fluid, A Metropolis Of Rigid Chaos.

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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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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.

The Luxury Of Our Position Now Is That We Can Almost Assemble Any Team To Address Any Issue.

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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.

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.

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

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.

Lagos Was Not Very Inviting Even To Lagosians. It Was Considered A No-go Zone, Almost In Its Entirety.

Escape From The Architecture Ghetto Is One Of The Major Drivers And Has Been From The Very Beginning.

Manhattan Is An Accumulation Of Possible Disasters That Never Happen.

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.

Without A Tighter Union, Europe Will Disintegrate

Architecture Is A Hazardous Mixture Of Omnipotence And Impotence. It Is By Definition A C H A O T I C A D V E N T U R E... In Other Words, The Utopian Enterprise.

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.

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.

The Good Is Not A Category That Interests Me.

When We Went In The Late 1990s, Nigeria Was Still In A Dictatorship. So We Didn't Go With A Mission. It Started Really With A Sort Of Blankness And Open-endedness.

Miami Beach Is A Completely Interesting Hybrid Because It Is, On The One Hand, A Resort And, On The Other Hand, A Real City. This Condition Of City And Water On Two Sides I Think Is Really Amazing. And In The Heart Of That City, It Has Put An Enormous Convention Center, An Enormous Physical Presence.

The Acceptance Of Certain Realities Doesn't Preclude Idealism. It Can Lead To Certain Breakthroughs.

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

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.

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

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There Is No Plateau Of Resting Or Stabilising. Once You Are Interested In How Things Evolve, You Have A Kind Of Never-ending Perspective, Because It Means You Are Interested In Articulating The Evolution, And Therefore The Potential Change, The Potential Redefinition.

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

Infrastructure Is Much More Important Than Architecture.

Manhattanism Is The One Urbanistic Ideology That Has Fed, From Its Conception, On The Splendors And Miseries Of The Metropolitan Condition—hyper-density—without Once Losing Faith In It As The Basis For A Desirable Modern Culture. Manhattan's Architecture Is A Paradigm For The Exploitation Of Congestion.

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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.

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Significant Things

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Discrepancies Between

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

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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.

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.

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.

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.

The City Is An Addictive Machine From Which There Is No Escape

I Wanted To Disconnect From Contemporary Architecture

The Grid Makes The History Of Architecture And All Previous Lessons Of Urbanism Irrelevant. It Forces Manhattan's Builders To Develop A New System Of Formal Values, To Invent Strategies For The Distinction Of One Block From Another. The Grid's Two-dimensional Discipline Also Creates Undreamt-of Freedom For Three-dimensional Anarchy. The Grid Defines A New Balance Between Control And De-control In Which The City Can Be At The Same Time Ordered And Fluid, A Metropolis Of Rigid Chaos.

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

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We Live In An Almost Perfect Stillness And Work With Incredible Urgency.

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

Prada Is Extremely Directed In Terms Of Communicating What They Like And What They Don't Like. That Is Actually Extremely Pleasant Because It Clarifies Very Easily What You Can Do And What You Need To Do.

Find Optimism In The Inevitable.

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Lagos Was The Ultimate Dysfunctional City - But Actually, In Terms Of All The Initiatives And Ingenuity, It Mobilised An Incredibly Beautiful, Almost Utopian Landscape Of Independence And Agency.

I Am Incredibly Bad At Predicting The Future; I Am Only Smart Enough To Observe The Present And Listen To My Intuition About Tendencies.

There's Nothing Dutch About My Architecture.

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