Rem Koolhaas Quotes

A great department store, easily reached, open at all hours, is more like a good museum of art than any of the museums we have yet established.

When air conditioning, escalators, and advertising appeared, shopping expanded its scale, but also limited its spontaneity. And it became much more predictable, almost scientific. What had once been the most surprising became the most manipulated.

I feel like there's so many places to shop today that just feel like an Excel spreadsheet put between four walls.

I'm lucky that I was in retailing during the time that I call the golden age of retailing.

A piazza is not a plaza. The plaza is the theme park of the piazza; the plaza is the commercial version. A piazza is an empty space with no function. This is what Europeans understand.

People are always going to go shopping. A lot of our effort is just: 'How do we make the retail experience a great one?'

I love chocolate, and I love to shop - just give me a good boutique. I like mall scenarios, too, because there's more right there at hand. I think Nashville could use some better shopping!

Strip malls are history.

The street is a room by agreement.

Television was supposed to be a national park. Instead it has become a money machine. It's a commodity now, just like pork bellies.

It's part of my life to feel like a criminal, to have eyes in my back and see if I'm being followed. It's a feeling that comes from street juggling because I have been arrested so many times.

I prefer department stores. In boutiques, they come up and ask you if you need help. I can't get lost in the experience.

I love the idea of the street vibe, having folks together, out in the street at midnight.

To me, such functions are like supermarket openings.

New York is a city with virtually no habitable public space - only private spaces expensively maintained within the general disaster.

In Google's world, public space is just something that stands between your house and the well-reviewed restaurant that you are dying to get to.

I believe in the city as a natural human environment, but we must humanize it. It's art that will re-define public space in the 21st Century. We can make our cities diverse, inspirational places by putting art, dance and performance in all its forms into the matrix of street life.

These days malls are the cathedrals of the modern world, and old buildings that had character are gone to allow for econo-worship and peso-pilgrimages.

The '90s was a decade of mundane market-consumer nothingness where there was nothing coming up from the streets; you just had someone in an office deciding what was cool.

Doing a mall is not only construction of the physical place: what is important is the merchandising mix. We strive to serve the convenience of the public. We want shopping at our malls to be a unique and an enjoyable experience.

I'm much more of a city girl. I like the mall. I like shopping.

There is no pedestrian culture [in South Central Los Angeles].

I guess country music works better in supermarkets.

The notion - and I tell you this one even worries me that it extends into New Urbanism - the notion of the shopping center [as] a valid kind of downtown. That's taken over. It's very hard for architects of this generation even to think in terms of a downtown or a center that is owned by all different people, with different ideas.

That’s the American Dream: to make your life into something you can sell.