Rem KoolhaasThinkers

Architecture is a dangerous mix of power and importance.

Architecture is a hazardous mixture of omnipotence and impotence, a chaotic adventure, and thus a utopian enterprise.

Architecture is able, but only able, to engender provisional freedoms in a definite situation, freedoms as the experiences, as the sensations, as the effects pleasurable, threatening, and otherwise of undermining select patterns of regulation and authority.

Architecture is increasingly revealing a discrepancy between the acceleration of culture and its continuing slowness.

Architecture is less about beauty than about appropriateness.

Architecture is narrative permeated by symbolism with purely biographical overtones.

Architecture is represented by two lives the one imagined by its maker and then also the life it lives afterward. They are never the same.

Architecture is something scientific and manipulating now, owing to the expansion of shopping with air conditioning, escalators, and advertising.

Architecture is the simultaneous generation of and definition of a space.

Architecture is today merely the organization of flow, circulation. (i.e. shopping centers, airports).

Architecture is today no longer the art of designing buildings so much as the brutal skyward extrusion of whatever site the developer has managed to assemble.