We live in an almost perfect stillness and work with incredible urgency.- Rem Koolhaas
The work in S, M, L, XL was almost suicidal. It required so much effort that our office almost went bankrupt.
The luxury of our position now is that we can almost assemble any team to address any issue.
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.
The areas of consensus shift unbelievably fast; the bubbles of certainty are constantly exploding.
Our office acts like a kind of educational establishment and we are very careful who we educate.
Not many architects have the luxury to reject significant things.
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.
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.
If you have this reputation you can sit back and endure it, or you can try to do things with it.
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.
Escape from the architecture ghetto is one of the major drivers and has been from the very beginning.
Any architectural project we do takes at least four or five years, so increasingly there is a discrepancy between the acceleration of culture and the continuing slowness of architecture.
