From Journalist to Architect

Well, unlike most architects, I had a profession before I was an architect.

I think that being a journalist had an important effect.

Journalism is ironically one of the few professions that is almost completely immune to fame.

There are almost no famous journalists.

The journalist is driven by an insatiable curiosity coupled with the ability to find and condense information quickly.

That experience, coupled with the fact that I started relatively late in architecture

—I was twenty-five before I even started studying architecture—

Made it relatively easy for me not to feel intimidated by the architecture world at that stage.

The great benefit of writing a book before practicing as an architect was that it helped me get work.

But it was bad because it meant that my subsequent work had to meet an unusually heavy burden of proof.

I think that my experience exposed me to a number of unspoken prejudices that still operate in the current cultural moment.

There’s a strange prejudice that says you cannot both think and do architecture at the same time

by Rem Koolhaas