Rem Koolhaas
Dutch architect (1944-)
The numbers
2 + 8 = 10
1 + 0 = 1
Lo Shu grid
Missing: 3, 5, 6. Present digits repeat to show how many times they occur.
Life path 1 — The Initiator
Tradition reads 1 as the number of origination — the point before anything has been divided. Practitioners associate it with people who move first, set direction, and carry the discomfort of being early. The same tradition is candid about the cost: the instinct that starts a thing is not the instinct that finishes it, and 1 is read as needing others precisely where it least wants to admit it.
Complete lines
Line of Reason
A complete line in the grid.
Line of Ambition
The 7-8-9 column complete. Read as drive that has both the wish and the machinery — the traditional marker of someone who converts intention into position.
Cooperation
A complete line in the grid.
Organisation
A complete line in the grid.
Repeated numbers
1 appears 6 times
Concentrated self-direction. Read as conviction that does not need external agreement — and does not always seek it.
What is missing
Missing 3
Read as difficulty getting the inner picture out — the thought is complete, the expression lags. Often described in people whose written voice is far stronger than their spoken one.
Missing 5
The centre of the grid, so its absence is weighted heavily. Read as difficulty adapting mid-course — a preference for the plan already chosen over the plan now indicated.
Missing 6
Read as a complicated relationship with obligation — either avoiding it or over-shouldering it, rarely a settled middle.
Vedic — Ank Jyotish
Moolank 8 comes from the day of the month alone; Bhagyank 1 from the whole date. They differ, which is the ordinary case — the two numbers answer different questions.
Shani
Saturn. Labour, delay, consequence. Feared in popular practice more than any other, and read as the graha that makes people earn things.
Bhagyank uses the same arithmetic as the Western life path, so the two will always agree. That is not two traditions confirming each other — it is one calculation under two names.
In their words
Architecture is a dangerous mixture of power and impotence.
Find optimism in the inevitable.
I live in a Victorian apartment building in London.
The city is no longer. We can leave the theatre now.
Bigness is no longer part of any urban tissue. (...) Its subtext is fuck context.
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.
Sourced from Wikiquote, restricted to the subject’s own sourced sections.