Daily Inspiration Quote by Rem Koolhaas

Koolhaas is doing two things at once here: conceding Western dominance while quietly downgrading it from destiny to habit. Calling the West an "intellectual force" frames power as a matter of models, narratives, and exported expertise rather than tanks or trade alone. It is a polite phrase that still carries a warning: the West has been writing the operating system for cities, and it assumes it will keep issuing updates.

The hinge is "other cultures are getting stronger". Strength, in this sentence, is not romantic authenticity; it is capacity: capital, institutions, technical confidence, and the willingness to produce theory instead of just consuming it. Koolhaas has spent decades watching modernism travel as a kind of universal template, then mutate in places where speed, density, and informality don’t politely match the European planning myth. His work and research (from Lagos to the Gulf to Chinese megacities) keeps returning to the same discomforting observation: the world’s most consequential urban experiments now often happen outside the West, and they do not ask permission from Western taste.

The line "less will be based on our models" is the real provocation. "Our" implicates the profession as a club that mistakes its standards for neutral truth. Subtext: Western planning ideals - legibility, zoning purity, heritage fetish, the hygienic separation of functions - are not just imperfect; they’re culturally specific answers to particular histories. As those histories stop being universal, architecture’s authority shifts from exporting solutions to learning how to read new realities without turning them into exotic case studies.