Aging & Wisdom Quote by Rem Koolhaas

Koolhaas isn’t offering a therapeutic mantra about “embracing complexity.” He’s issuing a field report from late modernity: the contemporary city, the contemporary self, the contemporary profession are all run on incompatible instructions at once. To live “in this age” is to be drafted into a permanent negotiation between forces that don’t reconcile - capital and citizenship, heritage and development, global sameness and local identity, speed and stagnation, security and spectacle.

The line’s quiet provocation is that contradiction isn’t a glitch; it’s the operating system. Koolhaas has spent a career reading skylines like x-rays of power: shopping malls as civic centers, airports as cathedrals, “public” space under private management. In that context, the “sense” he demands is less moral clarity than situational awareness. If you insist on purity - in politics, aesthetics, or planning - you’ll misread what you’re standing inside.

There’s also a jab at the architect’s traditional role as master-coherer, the person who imposes order. Koolhaas suggests that the age defeats that posture. The competent response isn’t to deny the mess or smooth it into a single narrative, but to design, think, and move with antennae up: alert to how progress can be predatory, how preservation can be exclusionary, how “innovation” can be branding.

The sentence works because it treats contradiction as a survival skill, not a philosophical hobby. It’s a demand for literacy in the crosswinds.