Rem Koolhaas Quotes

Baltimore is a goddamn ghetto. It's worse than Washington. It is shit.

The Bronx always seemed very dreary to me.

I remember as a kid not ever wanting to have friends around to my house because it was, for want of a better description, disheveled.

I suppose I'm a bit mean. My face on camera doesn't lend itself to happy nice guys. I think it's just that my bone structure looks menacing.

I remember Detroit feeling really unsafe, feeling scared a lot. Our house was broken into, our car was stolen, we had to get a watchdog, we would get beat up in the street, I had my bike stolen. There was just a lot of real anarchy on the streets and sidewalks.

I was in diapers when my parents left me with the babysitter to participate in an armored car robbery. They never came home.

New York City isn't Chuck E. Cheese. We don't have ball pits for the kids to play in. We have titty bars and crack.

Currently, it was leading him through a neighborhood that was on the downside of whatever curve you hoped you'd bought your property on the upside of. Graffiti and garbage were everywhere here. They were everywhere in the city, if it came to that, but elsewhere the garbage was better quality, and the graffiti was close to being correctly spelled. The whole area was waiting for something to happen, like a really bad fire.

Let's think about Mexican streets: they're unsafe because of violence, so people stay at home. Does that make streets more or less safe? Less safe! So streets become more desolate and unsafe, so we stay home more - which makes streets even more desolate and unsafe, and we stay home even more.

I was a very shy, overly big, kind of creepy-looking kid.

When you walk through a bad neighborhood, you don't want a poodle by your side. You want a Rottweiler.

Some people see Baltimore as a hopeless place. Some have even made a lot of money on it.

That's the poisoned chalice: when you're shy, people assume you're arrogant.

Detroit is a city that really stands out. It's been through a very difficult time. There's been a lot of pain here, and the city, physically, has suffered. You can see it in certain neighborhoods, and there's buildings downtown that have been abandoned.

If you don't visit the bad neighborhoods, the bad neighborhoods are going to visit you.

Knife crime and gun crime is poverty-driven, and poverty leads to insecurity.

Tonight the city is full of morgues, and all the toilets are overflowing. There's shopping malls coming out of the walls, as we walk out among the manure. That's why I pay no mind.

I lived for 10 years in Los Angeles, and the one element that surpasses everything else - that you are very conscious of - is fear. You can smell it.

I don't like cold people at all. It makes me feel really insecure.

If you've seen one city slum you've seen them all.

… a rude and remote kingdom

Australia is not a safe place.

Abandoned homes become magnets for vandalism and crime. They drag down the property values of neighboring homes.

For a long time a lot of people thought New Orleans wasn't a safe place and that it was very ratchet.