Rem Koolhaas
Remmert Lucas Koolhaas is a Dutch architect, architectural theorist, urbanist and "Professor in Practice of Architecture and Urban Design" at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University, USA. Koolhaas studied at the Netherlands Film and Television Academy in Amsterdam, at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London and at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Koolhaas is the principal of the OMA (Office for Metropolitan Architecture), and of its research-oriented counterpart AMO, currently based in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. In 2005 he co-founded Volume Magazine together with Mark Wigley and Ole Bouman.
In 2000 Rem Koolhaas won the Pritzker Architecture Prize. In 2008 Time Magazine put him in their top 100 of The World's Most Influential People.
“The Metropolis strives to reach a mythical point where the world is completely fabricated by man, so that it absolutely coincides with his desires.”
“Manhattanism is the one urbanistic ideology that has fed, from its conception, on the splendors and miseries of the metropolitan condition—hyper-density—without once losing faith in it as the basis for a desirable modern culture. Manhattan's architecture is a paradigm for the exploitation of congestion.”
“Architecture is a hazardous mixture of omnipotence and impotence. It is by definition a c h a o t i c a d v e n t u r e... In other words, the utopian enterprise.”
“There are books that I own that somehow even without reading them they mean something to me. So I think people have a relationship with books in a library whether you’ve come specifically to read them or not.”
“The cosmetic is cosmic.”
“Find optimism in the inevitable”