Daily Inspiration Quote by Rem Koolhaas

A provocation dressed as a concession, Koolhaas’s line needles the pieties of contemporary city-making: the earnest talk of “beauty” and “identity” as if they’re universally agreed goals, as if a city can be designed like a logo. He sets up that checklist only to flip it, suggesting that the supposedly failed product of late-20th-century urbanization - the generic, the placeless, the “characterless” - might be the thing people actually choose when they vote with their feet.

The subtext is less “ugly cities are fine” than “our moral language about cities is out of sync with our behavior.” Characterlessness becomes not a defect but an operating system: flexible, legible, unburdened by the obligations of heritage and taste. A city without a strong authored identity can absorb newcomers, new economies, new subcultures without constant battles over what “fits.” It’s the urban equivalent of a neutral background that lets life, not design, take the foreground.

Context matters: Koolhaas is a theorist of globalization’s built environment, attentive to malls, airports, office parks - the spaces elites dismiss but masses inhabit. He’s also wryly diagnosing a market reality: distinctive “quality” is expensive, regulated, often exclusionary. Genericness can be a kind of accessibility, even an alibi for freedom.

The intent is to unsettle a profession that flatters itself as guardian of meaning. If people desire the bland city, the architect’s task isn’t to paste on “identity,” but to understand what comfort, mobility, and low-friction living the so-called void is already providing - and what it quietly erases in return.