Rem Koolhaas Quotes

We refuse to recognize problems of form, but only problems of building. Form is not the aim of our work, but only the result. Form, by itself, does not exist. Form as an aim is formalism; and that we reject.

As a son of a man who pretended to be one thing for 33 years of my life and then was another thing, the questions of 'what is real' and 'what is not real' are very blurrily vivid to me.

I like the idea that we build up these walls or rules or laws to maintain our reality, and when they fall away, you're left with a whole bunch of illusions.

The stories we are told shape the way we see the world, which shapes the way we experience the world.

I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming I am a man.

Light is something that can really change your perception of space.

To be called one thing, is oftentimes to be another.

I'm nothing more than what you actually see, but I am also the complete opposite.

I think a lot of people want to be remembered the way they were, as opposed to the way they are now.

What we think, we become.

I do not agree with Thomas Wolfe... about anything. You can go home again as long as you don't expect home to be what it was when you left it. Or you don't expect yourself to be what you were when you left home.

There are only two things. Truth and lies. Truth is indivisible, hence it cannot recognize itself; anyone who wants to recognize it has to be a lie.

Don't ever take a fence down until you know why it was put up.

For those who pass it without entering, the city is one thing; it is another for those who are trapped by it and never leave. There is the city where you arrive for the first time; and there is another city which you leave never to return. Each deserves a different name; perhaps I have already spoken of Irene under other names; perhaps I have spoken only of Irene.

I thought I was an actor playing a wizard. But really, I was a wizard playing an actor.

You create your response to reality, and that response, for all practical purposes, is your reality.

One of the great beauties of architecture is that each time, it is like life starting all over again.

I think the fact that I look totally artificial, but I am totally real, has its own kind of magic in it.

Many years ago, we were only able to build boxes. Today, architects from all over the world are working with us - Zaha Hadid from London, Gerkan, Marg and Partner from Hamburg, Kengo Kuma from Japan. We brought design and digitalization from abroad to China.

To me, the building [of Museum of Arts and Design]now looks like a lovely jewel box, and the tiled façade reminds me of a heat shield.

Everything is illusory. You cannot label something and feel that that is the beginning, middle, and end of it.

Ninety-eight percent are boxes, which tells me that a lot of people are in denial. We live and work in boxes. People don't even notice that. Most of what's around us is banal. We live with it. We accept it as inevitable. People say, "This is the world the way it is, and don't bother me." Then when somebody does something different, real architecture, the push-back is amazing. People resist it. At first it's new and scary.

This, milord, is my family's axe. We have owned it for almost nine hundred years, see. Of course, sometimes it needed a new blade. And sometimes it has required a new handle, new designs on the metalwork, a little refreshing of the ornamentation . . . but is this not the nine hundred-year-old axe of my family? And because it has changed gently over time, it is still a pretty good axe, y'know. Pretty good.

Every well built house started in the form of a definite purpose plus a definite plan in the nature of a set of blueprints.