"We live in an almost perfect stillness and work with incredible urgency"
About this Quote
Koolhaas nails a modern paradox that architects live in but the rest of us only half-notice: the built world is slow, stubborn, and nearly immobile, while the forces shaping it move at panic speed. “Almost perfect stillness” is the city as object - concrete, codes, budgets, and infrastructure that resist change and outlast trends. It’s also the museum-like calm of late-capitalist urbanism: plazas kept pristine, facades curated, “public life” designed to feel frictionless. Against that, “incredible urgency” reads like a critique of the profession’s tempo and its patrons: developers chasing interest rates, mayors chasing headlines, corporations chasing quarterly narratives.
The line works because it’s both confession and indictment. Koolhaas isn’t romanticizing slowness; he’s describing a pressure cooker where decisions made in meetings and PDFs get frozen into decades of reality. Urgency becomes a kind of performance - the sprint to deliver renders, masterplans, and visionary language - even as the outcome, once poured and permitted, barely budges. That mismatch is where power hides: if the city feels “still,” it’s easier to treat today’s choices as inevitable rather than contested.
Contextually, it fits Koolhaas’s long obsession with modernity’s contradictions: hyperactive culture, stagnant systems; constant novelty draped over rigid frameworks. Architects, in this reading, are translators between tempos - asked to produce instant futures inside structures that move like geology. The aphorism is elegant because it doesn’t resolve the tension; it sharpens it into a professional condition.
The line works because it’s both confession and indictment. Koolhaas isn’t romanticizing slowness; he’s describing a pressure cooker where decisions made in meetings and PDFs get frozen into decades of reality. Urgency becomes a kind of performance - the sprint to deliver renders, masterplans, and visionary language - even as the outcome, once poured and permitted, barely budges. That mismatch is where power hides: if the city feels “still,” it’s easier to treat today’s choices as inevitable rather than contested.
Contextually, it fits Koolhaas’s long obsession with modernity’s contradictions: hyperactive culture, stagnant systems; constant novelty draped over rigid frameworks. Architects, in this reading, are translators between tempos - asked to produce instant futures inside structures that move like geology. The aphorism is elegant because it doesn’t resolve the tension; it sharpens it into a professional condition.
Quote Details
| Topic | Work |
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