Rem Koolhaas Quotes

Students must have initiative; they should not be mere imitators. They must learn to think and act for themselves - and be free.

I grew up in a family where our mother made our clothing. We didn't have a lot of money, so we learned how to scrimp, and we learned how to invent and to create. And those are learned skills.

Often I had to imagine the things I needed. I learned very early to read amidst noise. And so I started writing and drawing at an early age.

Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic; but destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country.

My dad said, 'If no one was giving me acting work, I'd have to be prepared to create it myself.'

I lived on nothing for years - squatted where I lived and where I worked, stole electricity, made things from stuff I found in skips, used paper that had been discarded - you do everything you can do to keep going and not have to get a job.

One of the things that I was always, and still am, is quite resourceful.

We have ... to convince the people of America's cities that government is on their side.

We can’t be a great country unless we have great cities.

I did all kinds of things as a young person to try to make money. I had a chicken operation - I sold chickens. I can remember going to high school football games as a ten-year-old and gathering Coca-Cola bottles, 'cause you'd turn them in and get a nickel. I wanted not to remain idle.

Other people might buy a Rolls-Royce. I'd rather encourage people to be creative.

I went to a small school, so I had to be a jack of all trades and master a few.

In New York, ingenuity goes hand-in-hand with the hustle to survive.

One of the things I noticed while I lived in New York City was how different the kids and teens were that grew up there versus, you know, my suburban upbringing. They have this innate resilience and toughness to them, and they're incredibly self-sufficient, usually from a pretty young age.

A tranquil city of good laws, fine architecture, and clean streets is like a classroom of obedient dullards, or a field of gelded bulls - whereas a city of anarchy is a city of promise.

City planning finds its validation in the intuitive recognition that a burgeoning market society can not be trusted to produce spontaneously a habitable, sanitary, or even efficient city, much less a beautiful one.

Your machinery is beautiful. Your society people have apologized to me for the envious ridicule with which your newspapers have referred to me. Your newspapers are comic but never amusing. Your Water Tower is a castellated monstrosity with pepperboxes stuck all over it. I am amazed that any people could so abuse Gothic art and make a structure not like a water tower but like a tower of a medieval castle. It should be torn down. It is a shame to spend so much money on buildings with such an unsatisfactory result. Your city looks positively dreary.

When the forest and the city are functionally indistinguishable, then we know we have reached sustainability.

But look what we have built low-income projects that become worse centers of delinquency, vandalism and general social hopelessness than the slums they were supposed to replace. Cultural centers that are unable to support a good bookstore. Civic centers that are avoided by everyone but bums. Promenades that go from no place to nowhere and have no promenaders. Expressways that eviscerate great cities. This is not the rebuilding of cities. This is the sacking of cities.

I would be a president for all of the people, African- Americans, the inner cities. Devastating what's happening to our inner cities. She's been talking about it for years. As usual, she talks about it, nothing happens. She doesn't get it done.

The modern city is ugly not because it is a city but because it is not enough of a city, because it is a jungle, because it is confused and anarchic, and surging with selfish and materialistic energies.

It is by all odds the loftiest of cities. It even managed to reach the highest point in the sky at the lowest moment of the depression.

The only ones who can really benefit by consulting the model are those who can produce their effect without a model.

The lack of resources is no longer an excuse not to act. The idea that action should only be taken after all the answers and the resources have been found is a sure recipe for paralysis. The planning of a city is a process that allows for corrections; it is supremely arrogant to believe that planning can be done only after every possible variable has been controlled.

You got to use what you got to get just what you want.