Rem Koolhaas Quotes

It is in the genes of cities to bounce back from disasters - whether natural or man made. The denizens of suburbia have no choice but to survive and move on. But it is the manner in which different cities respond to emergencies that sets them apart.

It's interesting, the worse things get in cities, the tougher that cities get, the more brutal the humor is. The tougher things people face, the darker the sense of humor gets and I find that incredibly optimistic.

When there were fears about the future of this nation's older cities... when a few of the cities teetered on the brink of bankruptcy, all eyes were focused on Chicago for contrast.

I'm sure that there are reasonable people that had some reasonable projections about the future of New Orleans, but none of those could include not trying to rebuild the city and make it better than it was before.

The city is going to survive, we are going to get through it, It's going to be very, very difficult time. I don't think we yet know the pain that we're going to feel when we find out who we lost, but the thing we have to focus on now is getting this city through this, and surviving and being stronger for it.

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.

Every city in the world can be improved in less than three years.

Anybody who predicts the death of cities has already met his spouse.

Nothing is ever lost, Sarah. Nothing that can't be found.

....he said it was interesting. He used the word 'textured'. He said 'smooth' is boring but 'textured' was interesting, and the scar meant that I was stronger than whatever had tried to hurt me.

When disaster waves, I try not to wave back.

When an airplane's engines fail, it is not the end of the flight.

The outpouring of support from health professionals who want to volunteer for Hurricane Katrina recovery efforts has been tremendous.

Population growth and the proliferation of mega-cities around the world redefines the entire global security agenda.

By comparison with other less hectic days, the city is unconfortable and inconvenient; but New Yorkers tempramentally do not crave comfort and convenience - if they did they would live elsewhere.

Cities are magical things. You know the energy in them. You have to walk the streets in any borough here and you can see between what was in this city in the 1970's and where it is today and how much more energy there is and how much more just sheer.

Lyndon Johnson rose above the doubt and fear to hold this Nation on course until we rediscovered our faith in ourselves.

Resilience is not what happens to you. It’s how you react to, respond to, and recover from what happens to you.

He didn't like it all that much when he first came - all the rubbish and the rush - but it was growing on him, it wasn't half bad. Coming to the city was like entering a tunnel, he said, and finding to your surprise that the light at the end didn't matter; sometimes in fact the tunnel made the light tolerable.

When things go awry, trust powers the generators until the problem is fixed.

When I'm in a city that's just clean, concrete lines, I get really short of breath and confused. It's much more interesting to me when nature is creeping back and tearing the mortar apart between the bricks.

Sometimes when these kinds of things happen, it can seem a little bit too much to bear. But what I want the people of Louisiana know is that you're not alone on this. Even after the TV cameras leave, the whole country is going to continue to support you and help you until we get folks back in their homes and lives are rebuilt.

What matters is not how well you can avoid trouble, but how you cope with trouble when it comes.

But you can build a future out of anything. A scrap, a flicker. The desire to go forward, slowly, one foot at a time. You can build an airy city out of ruins.

Disasters will always come and go, leaving their victims either completely broken or steeled and seasoned and better able to face the next crop of challenges that may occur.