List of Rem Koolhaas Quotes

When We Went In The Late 1990s, Nigeria Was Still In A Dictatorship. So We Didn't Go With A Mission. It Started Really With A Sort Of Blankness And Open-endedness.

Manhattan Has No Choice But The Skyward Extrusion Of The Grid Itself; Only The Skyscraper Offers Business The Wide-open Spaces Of A Man-made Wild West, A Frontier In The Sky.

Nigeria [in 1990] Was All Rumour, An Unbelievable Amount Of Rumour - Largely About Crime And Almost Mythical Manifestations Of Evil.

In Lagos There's A Really Strong Case To Resurrect Strong Parts. Embedded In All Of It Are Some Amazing Pieces Of Planning, Amazing Pieces Of Engineering And Interaction. For Instance, The Campus Of Lagos University Is Stunningly Beautiful, Efficient And Generous, And That Needs To Be Recognised And Preserved.

Miami Beach Is A Completely Interesting Hybrid Because It Is, On The One Hand, A Resort And, On The Other Hand, A Real City. This Condition Of City And Water On Two Sides I Think Is Really Amazing. And In The Heart Of That City, It Has Put An Enormous Convention Center, An Enormous Physical Presence.

It Was A Book [george Packer Written On Our Presence In Nigeria] That Was Killed By The Response Of Other People. Which Sounds Quite Cowardly, Perhaps, But It Was The First Manifestation Of What Is Currently A Really Big Issue: How Political Correctness Defines The Limits Of What You Can Do. In That Sense, It Was Super-exciting And Maybe The Most Magical Project We Did, But At The Same Time Fraught With Mixed Feelings.

Lagos Has Also Had A Particular Effect On My Career. I Was There Early, And Although It Was A Courageous Step To Go There And Invest On This Scale - I Went There Maybe 20 Times - It's Also Been Also Super-controversial. There's An Old School Of Thought That Somebody Like Me Has No Place To Go There.because Of Colonialism And So On.

Lagos Was The Ultimate Dysfunctional City - But Actually, In Terms Of All The Initiatives And Ingenuity, It Mobilised An Incredibly Beautiful, Almost Utopian Landscape Of Independence And Agency.

The Institutions Are Working Better Now, The Banks Are Much More Functional. At This Time, 1997, There Were No Mobile Phones! It's A Whole Different Thing Now With Mobile Phones: Technology Has Created A Form Of Regulation, Because People Can Actually Talk To Each Other A Lot More.

Manhattan Has Generated A Shameless Architecture That Has Been Loved In Direct Proportion To Its Defiant Lack Of Self-hatred, Has Been Respected Exactly To The Degree That It Went Too Far.

Nigeria Was A Blank On The Map - There Weren't Even Any Maps. The Us State Department, Everyone Said Don't Go There. It Was Courageous Of Harvard University: The Notion Was That We Would Match Harvard Students With Nigerian Students, So That Every Student Would Have A Guide, Creating A Guarantee Of Intimacy With The City.

Nobody Should Be Anything, But Because I Once Had A Different Profession And I'm Interested In Writing, I Took It Upon Me.