"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"
About this Quote
Koolhaas is pointing at an awkward truth the profession rarely admits out loud: architecture is structurally out of sync with the tempo of contemporary life. Culture now updates like software, in rapid patches of taste, politics, and platform-driven attention. Buildings, by contrast, arrive as hardware - expensive, regulated, litigated, engineered, value-engineered again. By the time a project opens, the world that commissioned it has often already moved on.
The line carries a double edge. On one hand, it reads as pragmatic realism from someone who has spent decades navigating clients, permitting, financing, and construction timelines. On the other, it’s a subtle critique of architecture’s self-mythology. The field loves to imagine itself as an avant-garde interpreter of the present, yet its production cycle makes it chronically retrospective. What gets built is frequently yesterday’s idea, dressed up as tomorrow.
Koolhaas’s subtext is also about power. “Acceleration of culture” isn’t just TikTok speed; it’s the churn of capital and media shaping what counts as relevant. Architecture’s slowness can look like integrity (durability, civic responsibility), but it can also be a liability: public needs shift faster than master plans, and crises - housing, climate, migration - don’t wait for a five-year delivery schedule.
Coming from Koolhaas, a figure who has both theorized globalization and designed for its patrons, the quote lands as diagnosis and warning. If architecture can’t develop new ways to respond in real time, it risks becoming a beautiful, permanent artifact of a culture that already changed the channel.
The line carries a double edge. On one hand, it reads as pragmatic realism from someone who has spent decades navigating clients, permitting, financing, and construction timelines. On the other, it’s a subtle critique of architecture’s self-mythology. The field loves to imagine itself as an avant-garde interpreter of the present, yet its production cycle makes it chronically retrospective. What gets built is frequently yesterday’s idea, dressed up as tomorrow.
Koolhaas’s subtext is also about power. “Acceleration of culture” isn’t just TikTok speed; it’s the churn of capital and media shaping what counts as relevant. Architecture’s slowness can look like integrity (durability, civic responsibility), but it can also be a liability: public needs shift faster than master plans, and crises - housing, climate, migration - don’t wait for a five-year delivery schedule.
Coming from Koolhaas, a figure who has both theorized globalization and designed for its patrons, the quote lands as diagnosis and warning. If architecture can’t develop new ways to respond in real time, it risks becoming a beautiful, permanent artifact of a culture that already changed the channel.
Quote Details
| Topic | Time |
|---|
More Quotes by Rem
Add to List
