Education Quote by Rem Koolhaas

An architect comparing his office to a school is a flex disguised as institutional humility. Koolhaas isn not praising mentorship so much as rebranding power: the firm becomes a gatekeeping apparatus that decides who gets access to its way of seeing the world. "Educational establishment" sounds benign, even public-spirited; "very careful who we educate" snaps it back into private capital, a reminder that knowledge in elite design culture is controlled, rationed, and strategically invested.

The intent is twofold. First, it frames practice as pedagogy, a refusal of the old model where an office is just a production line for buildings. In the OMA/AMO ecosystem, the output is as much discourse, research, and a certain Koolhaasian stance toward modernity as it is concrete and glass. Second, it positions the office as a talent refinery: young architects pass through, absorb a method, then disperse into the broader profession carrying the brand in their bloodstream.

The subtext is sharper: education here is not charity; it is succession planning and influence-building. Being "educated" by Koolhaas is a credential that travels, and the firm is selective because it understands that alumni become satellites extending its cultural reach. Context matters: Koolhaas came up in the late-20th-century moment when architecture became media-savvy, theory-literate, and globally networked. This line reads like an admission that in that world, the real monument isnt always a building; sometimes it is the pipeline.