Rem Koolhaas Quotes

Cities are the abyss of the human species.

Cities degrade us by magnifying trifles.

I don't like concrete jungles.

The screech and mechanical uproar of the big city turns the citified head, fills citified ears - as the song of birds, wind in the trees, animal cries, or as the voices and songs of his loved ones once filled his heart. He is sidewalk-happy.

City's just a jungle; more games to play Trapped in the heart of it, tryin' to get away I was raised in the country, I been workin' in the town I been in trouble ever since I set my suitcase down

The sweetest souls, like the sweetest flowers, soon canker in cities, and no purity is rarer there than the purity of delight.

New York is hard, cynical, ruthless, even beyond other cities. From their early repression its children emerge sophisticated, both stunted and overdeveloped, perverted, premature, forced by the artificiality of their environment.

I stayed in L.A. long enough to get on my feet, and then I moved back to New York. The reason I moved here was that I don't feel warm outside of a city; it's too barren in the suburbs, and L.A. is a suburb. Here, it felt active.

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.

New York City is my playground.

I don't like landscapes. I like cities. Lots of cities. I like buildings. I like streets.

L.A. is so big that if you don't actually live in Hollywood, you might as well be from a different planet.

I grew up in Houston, in a pretty urbane setting.

I'm very obsessed with the energy of New York and the idea of the way people behave in the city versus the way they behave in a natural environment.

The city is not a concrete jungle, it is a human zoo.

Cities are obvious metaphors for life. We call roads 'arteries' and so forth.

I live in L.A., I grew up here, it's not that crazy for me because it's L.A., you know?

The United States was born in the country and has moved to the city.

The modern city consists of...dark, narrow streets full of gasoline fumes, coal dust, and toxic gasses, torn by the noise.

... the business of life shuts us up within the environs of London and within sight of human advancement, which I should be so very glad to believe in without seeing.

People are the nature of the city, and you can feel it in the pavement.

New York is an ugly city, a dirty city. Its climate is a scandal, its politics are used to frighten children, its traffic is madness, its competition is murderous. But there is one thing about it - once you have lived in New York and it has become your home, no place else is good enough.

To live in a city is to be forever flinching.

There is practically no sense that is not violated every time we return from the country or the sea to Paris or London or New York.

In a few hours one could cover that incalculable distance; from the winter country and homely neighbours, to the city where the air trembled like a tuning-fork with unimaginable possibilities.