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1 " The most [...] literal proposal to solve the problem of congestion comes from Harvey Wiley Corbett [...] Ultimately, Corbett calculates, the entire surface of the city could be a single traffic plane, an ocean of cars, increasing the traffic potential 700 percent. "[...We see] a very modernized Venice, a city of arcades, plazas and bridges, with canals for streets, only the canals will not be filled with real water but with freely flowing motor traffic, the sun glistening on the black tops of the cars and the buildings reflecting in this waving flood of rapidly rolling vehicles. From an architectural viewpoint [...] the idea presents all the loveliness, and more, of Venice. There is nothing incongruous about it, nothing strange..." Corbett's "solution" for New York's traffic problem is the most blatant case of disingenuity in Manhattanism's history. Pragmatism so distorted becomes pure poetry. Not for the moment does the theorist intend to relieve congestion; his true ambition is to escalate it to such intensity that it generates -- as in a quantum leap -- a completely new condition, where congestion becomes mysteriously positive [... Corbett and the authors of the Regional Plan] have invented a method to deal rationally with the fundamentally irrational. [They know] that it would be suicide to solve Manhattan's problems, that they exist by the grace of these problems, that it is their duty to make its problems, if anything, forever insurmountable, that the only solution for Manhattan is the extrapolation of its freakish history, that Manhattan is the city of the perpetual flight forward. "
― Rem Koolhaas , Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan
2 " There are books that I own that somehow even without reading them they mean something to me. So I think people have a relationship with books in a library whether you’ve come specifically to read them or not. "
― Rem Koolhaas
3 " Architecture is a hazardous mixture of omnipotence and impotence. It is by definition a c h a o t i c a d v e n t u r e... In other words, the utopian enterprise. "
― Rem Koolhaas , S, M, L, XL
4 " Find optimism in the inevitable "
5 " The Metropolis strives to reach a mythical point where the world is completely fabricated by man, so that it absolutely coincides with his desires. "
6 " If less is more, maybe nothing is everything. "
7 " The cosmetic is cosmic. "
― Rem Koolhaas , Content
8 " Architecture is a fuzzy amalgamation of ancient knowledge and contemporary practice, an awkward way to look at the world and an inadequate medium to operate on it. Any architectural project takes five years; no single enterprise—ambition, intention, need—remains unchanged in the contemporary maelstrom. Architecture is too slow. Yes, the word "architecture" is still pronounced with certain reverence (outside the profession). It embodies the lingering hope—or the vague memory of a hope—that shape, form, coherence could be imposed on the violent surf of information that washes over us daily. Maybe, architecture doesn't have to be stupid after all. Liberated from the obligation to construct, it can become a way of thinking about anything—a discipline that represents relationships, proportions, connections, effects, the diagram of everything. "
9 " La Grandeza existe; como mucho, coexiste. Su subtexto es que se joda el contexto. "
― Rem Koolhaas , Acerca de la ciudad
10 " Like architecture, all paraphernalia of warfare are PC objects: the most rational possible instruments at the service of the most irrational possible pursuit. "
11 " In a laughing mirror-image of the seriousness with which the rest of the world is obsessed with Progress, Coney Island attacks the problem of Pleasure, often with the same technological means. "
12 " Manhattanism is the one urbanistic ideology that has fed, from its conception, on the splendors and miseries of the metropolitan condition—hyper-density—without once losing faith in it as the basis for a desirable modern culture. Manhattan's architecture is a paradigm for the exploitation of congestion. "
