Rem Koolhaas Quotes

Who I am as an architect and the history of my work - that's clear to anybody who hires me. But I come in literally with nothing in my brain about what the building will look like.

Before 2000, everything was about being contextual, and buildings were supposed to be good citizens.

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.

With couture, you feel obligated to design something modern each season, but with Theyskens Theory, I don't question anything. I'm thinking of what I'd like to wear.

I always think of buildings in their settings, but so do other architects.

We try to respond as closely as we can to the nature of each city, to the traditions, to their expectations. I don't believe that architects should be imposing their style or their plans on every city in the world.

There's a lot of fashion that I don't respond to and I just walk on. I always look for things that make me happy, and in my work, all I'm doing is trying to convey that joy. Fashion should always be fun.

My job is to interpret. I'm an interpreter. I can add things and bring unique qualities to the role that the writer may not have thought of, but someone else created the fundamental idea.

Coming upon a space that sounds unique and incredible is just the best feeling. Sometimes, it's under a bridge or down a stairwell or hallway. Sometimes, it's pitch-black or incredibly warm or in full daylight on a rooftop. I did a shoot recently for a clothing line, Somedays Lovin. I got to stand on the edge of a cliff overlooking the ocean and play my guitar basically all day. It felt endlessly powerful.

I couldn't say there is a formula to songwriting. Each time is a unique experience.

It is so easy to be average. It takes a little something to be special. Why be around average?

This afternoon, burn down the house. Tomorrow, pour critical water upon the simmering coals. Time enough to think and cut and rewrite tomorrow. But today-explode-f ly-apart-disint egrate! The other six or seven drafts are going to be pure torture. So why not enjoy the first draft, in the hope that your joy will seek and find others in the world who, by reading your story, will catch fire, too?

I feel like that's a way people can change the way music is - to be guided by someone they believe in and trust. Larson and I really believed in each other. It was like brother/sister, father/daughter, we were laughing and yelling, that's how it is when you make an album! Essentially the trust was there and I got something great.

Here's the truth you have to wrestle with: the reason that art (writing, engaging, leading, all of it) is valuable is precisely why I can't tell you how to do it. If there were a map, there'd be no art, because art is the act of navigating without a map. Don't you hate that? I love that there's no map.

The human person is a unique composite - a unity of spirit and matter, soul and body, fashioned in the image of God and destined to live forever. Every human life is sacred, because every human person is sacred.

Sometimes you write and you find yourself almost wondering how it will turn out. I don't think every writer sort of almost admits that at some stage his books can take on their own kind of life it selves and simply lead away into directions that they're not kind of prepared for.

I've never had a block. I'm talking within the limits of my abilities. But in my own small way, I've had an embarrassment of riches. I'll have five ideas and I'm dying to do them all. It takes weeks or months where I agonize and obsess over which to do next. I wish sometimes someone would choose for me. If someone said, Do idea number three next, that would be fine. But I have never had any sense of running dry.

I envy certain writers, because there are writers who do go into a kind of different zone, where the writing isn't controlled anymore.

My parents were always encouraging of us being creative however we wanted to be. People say, "You didn't get pressured into having to be a director?" But it's hard to be around my dad and not be curious about filmmaking, because he thinks it's the ultimate medium.

Believe it or not, people went so far as to suggest that I might not be able to write songs anymore because now I am married. I tried to explain again that there are other things to write about besides boy meets girl, girl meets boy, boy breaks up with girl, girl is sad.

Improvisation is the ability to create something very spiritual, something of one's own.

What excites me about a lot of the artists I love - and I realize, well, they created their own personal world that I could enter into through their music and through their songwriting. There's people that can do it instrumentally, like Jimi Hendrix or Edge of U2 or Pete Townshend. I didn't have as unique - a purely musical signature. I was a creature of a lot of different influences.

I don't have a name and I don't have a plot. I have the typewriter and I have white paper and I have me, and that should add up to a novel.

You don’t think when you play music, you just try to play and be in it. It is the same for me when the writing is going really well. It’s the same kind of feeling. I’m just in it. It’s not the words, it’s not the sentences, I’m not aware of it. Then it’s good.

[Great artists] do not copy what they see, but what they desire.