Rem Koolhaas

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.

As an architect, I always have mixed feelings. On the one hand, your fingers are itching. As a human being, you are happy to participate in the indolence.

Journalists seem mostly interested in what brand of shoes I wear.

The word 'celebrity' and the word 'architect' are basically incompatible.

But now sustainability is such a political category that it's getting more and more difficult to think about it in a serious way. Sustainability has become an ornament.

One of our theories is that one can offset this excessive compulsion toward the spectacular with a return to simplicity.

I'd say that my profession ends where architectural thinking ends - architectural thinking in terms of thinking about programs and organizational structure. These abstractions play a role in many other disciplines, and those disciplines are now defining their 'architectures' as well.

I think one of the important evolutions is that we no longer feel compulsively the need to argue, or to justify things on a kind of rational level. We are much more willing to admit that certain things are completely instinctive and others are really intellectual.

Influence is a very unpleasant subject and I deal with it in a maybe irresponsible way, which is to really ignore it. It would be a nightmare if we started to really think about it; it would tie our hands, it would tie everyone else's hands.

Our office acts like a kind of educational establishment and we are very careful who we educate.

It's a weird city because the uglier the weather, the more beautiful the city. And the uglier the buildings, the more coherent the city.

Each building has to be beautiful, but cheap and fast, but it lasts forever. That is already an incredible battery of seemingly contradictory demands. So yes, I'm definitely perhaps contradictory person, but I operate in very contradictory times.

The acceptance of certain realities doesn't preclude idealism. It can lead to certain breakthroughs.

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.

The great problem of the concert hall is that the shoebox is the ideal shape for acoustics but that no architect worth their names wants to build a shoebox.

Architects work in two ways. One is to respond precisely to a client's needs or demands. Another is to look at what the client asks and reinterpret it.

The luxury of our position now is that we can almost assemble any team to address any issue.

When shopping was still connected to the street it was also an intensification and articulation of the street. Now it has become utterly independent - contained, controlled, surveyed.

We say we want to create beauty, identity, quality, singularity. And yet, maybe in truth these cities that we have are desired. Maybe their very characterlessness provides the best context for living.

That has been my entire life story, running against the current and running with the current. Sometimes running with the current is underestimated.