The beautiful thing about being an autodidact is that you do not occupy a defined territory. You can define your territory the way you want. Plus the fact that autodidacts have not received a specific amount of knowledge but begin and end by creating their own body of knowledge. Therefore, they are not complacent because they are never finished with learning.

– Rem Koolhaas (2018)

In architecture, people are always waiting for the medium that will kill architecture, and nevertheless, architecture is still around. What is highly likely is that virtual reality will merge with concrete reality. What we are witnessing today are basically virtual conditions partly reinforcing the presence of physical architecture.

– Rem Koolhaas (1995)

Everyone wants to treat art and architecture as a matter of taste, when I want to consider it as a matter of knowledge.

— Donald Judd (1987)

Mommy, a door is not a sculpture.

— Max Rafailidis (2024)

When something commonplace is appropriated for purposes that exceed convention, it bears paying special attention to how and why this is done. Walking is no exception.

— Lori Waxman (2017)

In printing, a cliché is a slug of lead type pre-cast to make up a word — Sale or Notice — rather than a word composed of individual letters. These pre-cast words are also known as stereotypes. The common meaning of cliché, meaning something overused or stale, derived from this idea of the ready-made typographic phrase.

— Michael Rock (2012)

Sometimes architects are also required to present a perspective drawing in as naturalistic a style as possible. Such architectural pictures, always equipped with details from the latest contemporary design repertoire, are even more impossible than the neutral white models. Yet these two presentation techniques are internally related: while the one technique suggests knowledge through the omission of information, the other naturalistic technique achieves the same end through an overabundance of information. The more naturalistic such a perspective drawing is, the more deceptive is its intention. A pictorial space comes into being which is more and more often perceived as real. Nonetheless, only a mood is captured, the single illusion of a not-yet-existing reality. The traditional filmmaker uses this means to begin the action. But in the case of an architectural image, aside from the emotional field of action of the architect himself, this action is wholly lacking. Architecture, that is, the reality of architecture, cannot be represented through a perspective, naturalistic and illusionistic, manually or computer-aided produced drawing. Once fixed, the image of such an architecture will turn against its creator. It will wear out and become as ludicrous as the love letters once intended for an ex-girlfriend. The image will become confining because it fears the reality of the architecture arising from it. The perspective drawing will become confining because it does not allow its observer any new mode of seeing other than that which its author intended or any new perspective other than the one chosen. The perspective, naturalistic mode of presentation for architecture is therefore authoritarian and anti-enlightening. To the same degree, the architecture presented in this manner will tend to reflect such a position.

— Jaques Herzog (1988)

The End of Modernism

Understanding architecture today inevitably leads to a series of diverse positions, ranging from utopian to pragmatic, from ordinary to heroic, from engaged to relaxed, often looking beyond the boundaries of the very discipline. New issues like conditioned contemporaneity, design as substraction, and deliberate rhizomatic choices, point towards the end of modernism as we knew it, but we feel fine. Based on events and images, the supermodern architect interprets the present tense, thinks through visual icons, enhances defaults, manipulates reality, and is skeptical towards all-embracing theories and autonomy of architecture. Beyond misused terms like “landscape,” “infrastructure” or “ecology,” there is a true interest in architecture as an operative discourse. The dawn of the new century shall witness the end of classical perspective and 3D space, a final rejection of formalism, the end of aesthetics, a shift towards non-authorship and termination of urban planning. A new condition of deeper architectural thinking beyond Y2K will bring a cultivation of themes like ordinariness, fragmentation, time-related process, social welfare, and mass culture. The form will be generated rather than designed. It was The Author who produced The Object, it is The Interdisciplinary that defines The Process. Combinations of analog and digital will proliferate. Imaginative, client-oriented re-programming will be appreciated as a reliable strategy. The “faith in fakes,” the exclusion of architecture from every practice grounded on morphology, composing with readymades, taming infrastructure, merging corporate brands, and shaping of consumers’ culture will be the points of departure for the profession. An architecture “just there.”

— Hrvoje Njiric (1999)

Some architecture is easy to like. Ours frightens some people.

— Denise Scott Brown (Content 2004)

The problem is that to most human beings, pain, hunger, [the violence of public space, bad architecture, as well as poverty, dirtiness, and oppression] are insignificant. [...] For a child who has starved all his life, or a woman who has been beaten since she was a teenager, [...] pain is not a semiotic habit. It is an insignificant, mute condition of existence with no alternative horizon. (emphasis by author.)

— Massimo Leone (Leone 2019, 14-15)

Was OMA ever actually owned by the four of you?

ZZ: Owned?!

— Zoe Zhenghelis (CLOG 2014)

Architecture is not meant to make people happy. Architecture is designed— like any art form— architecture is designed to move people, and moving people is by definition antithetical to the stable mediocre state of happiness. If you move somebody there are ups and there are downs; there are exceptions, there are rules; there are conventions, there are the break of conventions. It is by definition, moving— you know, the emotional moving of people— you know; if there is comedy, there is tragedy; if there's this, there's that. I mean, it's about the essential reciprocity between extremes and that is fundamentally, fundamentally(!) different from the pursuit of happiness.

— Reinier de Graaf (CCA Channel 2019)

[...] he (Charles Jencks) became a friend and he was completely relentless and almost daily, confronting me with my inability to do facades, and it really became a problem. Our friendship survived, but he gave me an enormous inferiority complex and so I think that you know all of my facades are born in inferiority complex and with the basic understanding that I can't do a facade so it's a kind of desperate struggle to find alternative materials, alternative ways, alternative sensations [...]

— Rem Koolhaas (Kunsthal Rotterdam Channel 2017)

My philosophical concept of Constructed Landscape [...] is based on the historical direction of all eras, recognizing in each period the expression of the aesthetic thinking that is manifested in the other arts. In this sense, my work reflects modernity, the date on which it takes place, but never loses sight of the reasons for its own tradition, which are valid and necessary.

— Roberto Burle Marx (Concepts in Landscape Composition 1954)

Since the very beginning of history, gardens were intimately related to man. When man stops being nomad (sic.), he tries to limit space by means of hedges and walls. Within that limited area, he plants what is necessary to his subsistence and starts to  develop a selective knowledge of certain elements of the flora. He selects plants that are medicinal, others that have a magical or religious significance and even some that appeal to him because of their shape or color.

— Roberto Burle Marx (Gardens and Landscape, undated)

The successful use of color is one of the most difficult things in the world.

— Roberto Burle Marx (The Garden as a Form of Art 1962)

Cited Works

Burle Marx, Roberto. 2020. Roberto Burle Marx Lectures: Landscape as Art and Urbanism. Edited by Gareth Doherty. N.p.: Lars Müller Publishers.

CCA Channel. 2019. “What do we do if they want to be happy? Interview with Reinier de Graaf.” YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aufc1mmvqJI.

“Interview Madelon Vriesendrop and Zoe Zenghelis.” 2014. In Rem, edited by Kyle May and Julia van d. Hout. N.p.: Clog.

Koolhaas, Rem. 2024. “Art Applied.” In Art Applied: Inside Outside/Petra Blaisse, edited by Fredi Fischli, Niels Olsen, Nelson Olsen, and Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich Institut für Geschichte und Theorie der Architektur. N.p.: MACK.

Koolhaas, Rem, and Francesco Bonami. 1995. “Towards a Cyberspacial Urban Terrain.” Flash Art International no. 182 (May-June).

Koolhaas, Rem, and Hans U. Obrist. 2004. “Re-learning from Las Vegas.” In Content. N.p.: Taschen.

Leone, Massimo. 2019. On Insignificance: The Loss of Meaning in the Post-material Age. N.p.: Routledge.