Rem Quotes

So when you're in REM sleep, your brain is very active, our body is quiet, but your brain is really processing a lot of things, a lot of emotions; we dream the most in REM sleep. And then you go back down in the deep stages, and so on and so forth. ~ Shelby Harris

One of our theories is that one can offset this excessive compulsion toward the spectacular with a return to simplicity. ~ Rem Koolhaas

The areas of consensus shift unbelievably fast; the bubbles of certainty are constantly exploding. ~ Rem Koolhaas

And you cycle throughout so that you do about five to six cycles throughout the night. And we spend more time in REM later on in the night than we do earlier on. ~ Shelby Harris

All important architecture of the last century was strongly influenced by political systems. Look at the Soviet system, with its constructivism and Stalinism, Weimer with its Modern style, Mussolini and the Nazis and Albert Speer's colossal structures. Today's architecture is subservient to the market and its terms. The market has supplanted ideology. Architecture has turned into a spectacle. It has to package itself and no longer has significance as anything but a landmark. ~ Rem Koolhaas

I never sleep. Like the dolphin and the spiny anteater, I don't experience REM. Unlike the dreamless mammals, I'm a construct. I am a living program inside a vast network of electronic impulses known as the LINK. In that datastream I've uncovered the meaning of another kind of dreaming
that of a fond hope or aspiration, a yearning, a desire, or a passion. This much I have. When I dream, I dream of Mecca. ~ Lyda Morehouse

One cannot completely avoid this landmark character with large buildings such as these. But the city itself is also gigantic. ~ Rem Koolhaas

Sleep paralysis is something that is actually very common. Many people have it, I've had it myself. And what happens is, when you're in that REM stage of sleep, your brain is very active. You're dreaming your most during that stage, you're mind, your eyes are moving, there's a lot going on. It's like fireworks going on in your brain. ~ Shelby Harris

The word 'celebrity' and the word 'architect' are basically incompatible. ~ Rem Koolhaas

Sleeping Atlantis

Silent cool waters
dancing upon her skin ~
silent cool water
ushering dreams within... ~ Muse

When you're in the more deeper stages of sleep - REM sleep, your body is quiet, but your mind is actually very active. So it's a time when your body and your brain is restoring itself. It's repairing any cell damage that happened during the day, it's really repairing, like I said, repairing your body, but also helps with digestion, helps with memory. ~ Shelby Harris

When we went in the late 1990s, Nigeria was still in a dictatorship. So we didn't go with a mission. It started really with a sort of blankness and open-endedness. ~ Rem Koolhaas

In this branch of utopian real estate, architecture is no longer the art of designing buildings so much as the brutal skyward extrusion of whatever site the developer has managed to assemble. ~ Rem Koolhaas

Architects work in two ways. One is to respond precisely to a client's needs or demands. Another is to look at what the client asks and reinterpret it. ~ Rem Koolhaas

It's a weird city because the uglier the weather, the more beautiful the city. And the uglier the buildings, the more coherent the city. ~ Rem Koolhaas

The stronger the identity, the more it imprisons, the more it resists expansion, interpretation, renewal, contradiction. ~ Rem Koolhaas

With the idea that a single creator can build a society wherein a huge number of people will live, Le Corbusier later approached Stalin. In India, he charmed a powerful provincial family and ended up making huge, sculptural relics in Chandigarh. ~ Masato Otaka

I am incredibly bad at predicting the future; I am only smart enough to observe the present and listen to my intuition about tendencies. ~ Rem Koolhaas

That has been my entire life story, running against the current and running with the current. Sometimes running with the current is underestimated. ~ Rem Koolhaas

Dreams are associated with a state called REM sleep, the abbreviation standing for rapid eye movement. The REM state is strongly correlated with sexual arousal. Experiments have been performed in which sleeping subjects are awakened whenever REM state emerges, while members of a control group are awakened just as often each night but not when they're dreaming. After some days, the control group is a little groggy, but the experimental group - the ones who are prevented from dreaming - is hallucinating in daytime. It's not that a few people with a particular abnormality can be made to hallucinate in this way; anyone is capable of hallucinations. ~ Carl Sagan

Lagos was a city that had been turned against itself. There was a bridge that became the perfect trap for crimes, which began with nails being scattered to cause flat tyres. If the driver stopped, the car would be dismantled in 20 minutes and the parts thrown overboard [to people waiting below]. The system had turned into a kind of destructive device that could be used against people. That was the narrative. ~ Rem Koolhaas

When air conditioning, escalators, and advertising appeared, shopping expanded its scale, but also limited its spontaneity. And it became much more predictable, almost scientific. What had once been the most surprising became the most manipulated. ~ Rem Koolhaas

Journalists seem mostly interested in what brand of shoes I wear. ~ Rem Koolhaas

So we go through in the beginning of the night, we go into the really deep stages of sleep and we actually cycle through. So, when you go down to the deep stage, then you go back up and you actually come into something called REM sleep, which is after about 90 minutes. ~ Shelby Harris

At that time [90th in Lagos], if you drove through the city, you drove through a foreground that always seemed to be incredibly dramatic and incredibly agonised - smoking, burning, incredible compression. In the first year we stayed on the ground and went everywhere. But then in order to discover whether this was the whole story, we rented a helicopter. And we began to understand that this is not chaos but a highly modern system that had been abandoned, then at some point went into reversal, then slowly came out of it. ~ Rem Koolhaas

Criticism per se does not worry me. I've always solicited it as part of the design process. ~ Rem Koolhaas

Architecture is a dangerous mix of power and importance. ~ Rem Koolhaas

There is some evidence that dreaming is necessary. When people or other mammals are deprived of REM sleep (by awakening them as soon as the characteristic REM and EEG dream patterns emerge), the number of initiations of the dream state per night goes up, and, in severe cases, daytime hallucinations-that is, waking dreams-occur. ~ Carl Sagan

We felt it was very important for an entity like CCTV to make its presence felt ... To generate a space and to define a space, that is the main thing. ~ Rem Koolhaas

I've been an REM fan since I was a little girl. I would jump around to 'Stand' in the mirror. ~ Kirsten Dunst

I studied in London in 1968. Our school had a separate department of tropical architecture. Of course it was totally unfashionable, partly because nobody wanted to think about colonialism, but basically what you learned there was that, OK, the sun is here, so you should create natural ventilation here - an unbelievable amount of really sound principles that have been completely abandoned, so now everything is air conditioned with big machines. ~ Rem Koolhaas

Lagos was the ultimate dysfunctional city - but actually, in terms of all the initiatives and ingenuity, it mobilised an incredibly beautiful, almost utopian landscape of independence and agency. ~ Rem Koolhaas

Japan lives with drastic segregation between the sublime, the ugly, and the utterly without qualities. Dominance of the last 2 categories makes mere presence of the first stunning: when beauty 'happens', it is absolutely surprising. ~ Rem Koolhaas

People can inhabit anything. And they can be miserable in anything and ecstatic in anything. More and more I think that architecture has nothing to do with it. Of course, that's both liberating and alarming. ~ Rem Koolhaas

My girlfriend says that I thrash throughout the night, for longer periods than are generally accepted as corresponding to REM sleep, and she often has to move to the couch to get any sort of rest before she goes to work in the morning. ~ Keith Murray

In REM sleep the body is paralyzed, except for shallow breathing and eye movements. ~ Oliver Sacks

Designs are increasingly winning competitions because they are literally green, and because somewhere they feature a small windmill. ~ Rem Koolhaas

If you have this reputation you can sit back and endure it, or you can try to do things with it. ~ Rem Koolhaas

I am diagnosed with what's called 'REM behavior disorder.' As far as the disorder goes, there's no cure, but it's going pretty well as far as these things go. I see a sleep doctor, take medication, etc. ~ Mike Birbiglia

I believe architecture is a cultural output and I think Rem Koolhaas is one of the rare individuals who was able to really output architecture as cultural artifact. ~ Jimenez Lai

I made an appointment with a sleep doctor, who explained that during the sleep study people would be watching me sleep and monitoring my brain waves to see how I reacted during the four stages of sleep. I'd explain those stages if I could spell all the complicated words but they basically range from "Wide awake" to "Just barely not dead."

My sleep cycle is a bit more elaborate.

The seven stages of sleep (according to my body)

STAGE 1: You take the maximum dose of sleeping pills, but they don't work at all and then you glare at their smug bottles at three a.m., whispering, "You lying bastards."

STAGE 2: You fall asleep for eight minutes and you have that dream where you've missed a semester of classes and don't know where you're supposed to be and when you wake up you realize that even in your sleep you're fucking your life up.

STAGE 3: You close your eyes for just a minute but never lose consciousness and then you open your eyes and realize it's been hours since you closed your eyes and you feel like you've lost time and were probably abducted by aliens.

STAGE 4: This is the sleep that you miss because you're too busy looking up "Symptoms of Alien Abduction" on your phone.

STAGE 5: This is the deep REM sleep that recharges you completely and doesn't actually exist but is made up by other people to taunt you.

STAGE 6: You hover in a state of half sleep when you're trying to stay under but ~ Jenny Lawson

Each building has to be beautiful, but cheap and fast, but it lasts forever. That is already an incredible battery of seemingly contradictory demands. So yes, I'm definitely perhaps contradictory person, but I operate in very contradictory times. ~ Rem Koolhaas

The cosmetic is cosmic. ~ Rem Koolhaas

In the end, there will be little else for us to do but shop. ~ Rem Koolhaas

Everybody dreams, but memory for dreams is famously elusive. Even Sigmund Freud, without the benefit of modern technology's electroencephalogram, or EEG, did not know that adult humans dream 90 minutes per night, and that newborns spend eight hours per day dreaming (out of their 16 hours of sleep). REM sleep helps grow the brain! ~ Charles McPhee

Our office acts like a kind of educational establishment and we are very careful who we educate. ~ Rem Koolhaas

There are essentially two possibilities. One is to be, shall we say, an average architect and do the same thing everywhere. The other is to let yourself be inspired and even changed by the unique qualities of the place where you're building. We always try to take the second approach. ~ Rem Koolhaas

The good is not a category that interests me. ~ Rem Koolhaas

It is not possible to live in this age if you don't have a sense of many contradictory forces. ~ Rem Koolhaas

In a script, you have to link various episodes together, you have to generate suspense and you have to assemble things - through editing, for example. It's exactly the same in architecture. Architects also put together spatial episodes to make sequences. ~ Rem Koolhaas

When shopping was still connected to the street it was also an intensification and articulation of the street. Now it has become utterly independent - contained, controlled, surveyed. ~ Rem Koolhaas

The Grid makes the history of architecture and all previous lessons of urbanism irrelevant. It forces Manhattan's builders to develop a new system of formal values, to invent strategies for the distinction of one block from another. The Grid's two-dimensional discipline also creates undreamt-of freedom for three-dimensional anarchy. The Grid defines a new balance between control and de-control in which the city can be at the same time ordered and fluid, a metropolis of rigid chaos. ~ Rem Koolhaas

No matter what painful things happens, even when it looks like you'll lose... when no one else in the world believes in you... when you don't even believe in yourself... I will believe in you! ~ Rem

Most Radiohead songs are actually REM songs, I just have a mentally ill child read the lyrics aloud and then I change the melodies a bit. ~ Thom Yorke

The work in S, M, L, XL was almost suicidal. It required so much effort that our office almost went bankrupt. ~ Rem Koolhaas

That has been another interesting discovery: that basically a city [Lagos] could recover from a really deep, deep, deep pit. ~ Rem Koolhaas

She heard nothing but experienced a sensation that prickled along her spine like a warm touch caressing her skin. Slowly, with the care of prey beneath a predator's survey, she turned her head- and met the gaze of the elegant gentleman lounging at the door.
In her travels, she had seen many a striking and charming man, but none had been as handsome as this- and all had been more charming. This man was a statue in stark black and white, hewn from rugged granite and adolescent dreams. His face wasn't really handsome; his nose was thin and crooked, his eyes heavy lidded, his cheekbones broad, stark and hollowed. But he wielded a quality of power, of toughness, that made Eleanor want to huddle into a shivering, cowardly little ball.
Then he smiled, and she caught her breath in awe. His mouth... his glorious, sensual mouth. His lips were wide, too wide, and broad, too broad. His teeth were white, clean, strong as a wolf's. He looked like a man seldom amused by life, but he was amused by her, and she realized in a rush of mortification that she remained standing on the stool, reading one of his books and lost to the grave realities of her situation. The reality that stated she was an imposter, sent to mollify this man until the real duchess could arrive.
Mollify? Him? Not likely. Nothing would mollify him. Nothing except... well, whatever it was he wanted. And she wasn't fool enough to think she knew what that was.
The immediate reality was that she would someho ~ Christina Dodd

We say we want to create beauty, identity, quality, singularity. And yet, maybe in truth these cities that we have are desired. Maybe their very characterlessness provides the best context for living. ~ Rem Koolhaas

The great problem of the concert hall is that the shoebox is the ideal shape for acoustics but that no architect worth their names wants to build a shoebox. ~ Rem Koolhaas

But now sustainability is such a political category that it's getting more and more difficult to think about it in a serious way. Sustainability has become an ornament. ~ Rem Koolhaas

If less is more, maybe nothing is everything. ~ Rem Koolhaas

You need to look at inequality as a typical condition of modern society. ~ Rem Koolhaas

Escape from the architecture ghetto is one of the major drivers and has been from the very beginning. ~ Rem Koolhaas

The acceptance of certain realities doesn't preclude idealism. It can lead to certain breakthroughs. ~ Rem Koolhaas

The Metropolis strives to reach a mythical point where the world is completely fabricated by man, so that it absolutely coincides with his desires. ~ Rem Koolhaas

The intellectual force of the West is still dominant, but other cultures are getting stronger. I expect that we will develop a new way of thinking in architecture and urban planning, and that less will be based on our models. ~ Rem Koolhaas

Lagos has also had a particular effect on my career. I was there early, and although it was a courageous step to go there and invest on this scale - I went there maybe 20 times - it's also been also super-controversial. There's an old school of thought that somebody like me has no place to go there.Because of colonialism and so on. ~ Rem Koolhaas

To actually make you believe that your problems were spiritual and mental but absolutely not boozical. Good Christ, just the alcohol-related loss of the REM sleep was enough to screw you up righteously, but somehow you never thought of that while you were active. Booze turned your thought-processes into something akin to that circus routine where all the clowns come piling out of the little car. ~ Stephen King

The luxury of our position now is that we can almost assemble any team to address any issue. ~ Rem Koolhaas

We know that Las Vegas is junk, but at the same time I think that exactly the same process and ultimately also, perhaps the same logic, attaches itself to or underlies our masterpieces. We live in an amazing era when in spite of an absence of masters there is an explosion of masterpieces. ~ Rem Koolhaas

Everyone is talking about sustainability and resilience, yet all that knowledge is thrown in the bin. [Lagos is] a unique case, but also a test case. It's unbelievably unique, but also it's now considered with a number of really generic opinions, generic solution, generic expectations. ~ Rem Koolhaas

So you have Sleep Stage One, Two, and then Three/Four. One is a little bit lighter stage of the quiet, non-REM sleep and then Three/Four is really deep, deep sleep. And what you want is, you actually want a number of - you want to go through all of these stages throughout the night. ~ Shelby Harris

Most old cities are now sclerotic machines that dispense known qualities in ever-greater quantities, instead of laboratories of the uncertain. Only the skyscraper offers business the wide-open spaces of a man-made Wild West, a frontier in the sky. ~ Rem Koolhaas

It was a book [George Packer written on our presence in Nigeria] that was killed by the response of other people. Which sounds quite cowardly, perhaps, but it was the first manifestation of what is currently a really big issue: how political correctness defines the limits of what you can do. In that sense, it was super-exciting and maybe the most magical project we did, but at the same time fraught with mixed feelings. ~ Rem Koolhaas

Nigeria was a blank on the map - there weren't even any maps. The US State Department, everyone said don't go there. It was courageous of Harvard University: the notion was that we would match Harvard students with Nigerian students, so that every student would have a guide, creating a guarantee of intimacy with the city. ~ Rem Koolhaas

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. ~ Rem Koolhaas

Infrastructure is much more important than architecture. ~ Rem Koolhaas

Influence is a very unpleasant subject and I deal with it in a maybe irresponsible way, which is to really ignore it. It would be a nightmare if we started to really think about it; it would tie our hands, it would tie everyone else's hands. ~ Rem Koolhaas

Prada is extremely directed in terms of communicating what they like and what they don't like. That is actually extremely pleasant because it clarifies very easily what you can do and what you need to do. ~ Rem Koolhaas

A curiosity: my name, Rem, will someday come to mean a line of text in a language spoken only by machines. Specifically, it will mean a line that the machines can safely ignore
one that's only there as a mnemonic, a placeholder, for the people who give the machines their orders. A REM line might say something like "this bit is a self-contained sub loop" or "Steve Perlman in Marketing is a shit." The program as a whole rolls on past and around the REM lines, ignores them completely as it takes its shape, moves through its pre-ordained sequences, unfolds its wonders. My mother named me well. ~ Louise Carey

The people from the suburbs are bringing along their suburban values: cleanliness, orderliness, safety - dullness, in other words. As a result, urban areas are being hollowed out. Just look at Times Square in New York. No more sex shops, no drugs, no homeless people. The area is clinically clean and incredibly dull. ~ Rem Koolhaas

Without a tighter union, Europe will disintegrate ~ Rem Koolhaas

Early studies of sleep and dreaming were crucially dependent on waking subjects up during sleep to find out whether they are dreaming or not. Using that strategy, it was found that when the eyes are rapidly moving (REM sleep) people are usually dreaming; when the eyes are not moving, there may be some mentation, but little in the way of visually rich dreams. ~ Patricia Churchland

I wish I could concentrate on dancing
Instead of spending so much time pretending
I am still in junior high
But with Rem, I want to be sixteen
Or, like Alice in Wonderland,
Sometimes smaller,
Sometimes bigger still. ~ Stasia Ward Kehoe

Let's put it this way: One can be happy or unhappy in a building. But some buildings make us more depressed than others. ~ Rem Koolhaas

How great an evil do you see that may have been announced by you against the Republic? - Videtis quantum scelus contra rem publicam vobis nuntiatum sit? ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

Nigeria [in 1990] was all rumour, an unbelievable amount of rumour - largely about crime and almost mythical manifestations of evil. ~ Rem Koolhaas

Dammit. There goes my REM sleep. ~ Alysa Cole