The Architecture Per Se Isn't At Fault.

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.

One Cannot Completely Avoid This Landmark Character With Large Buildings Such As These. But The City Itself Is Also Gigantic.

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, Of Course, 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.

The Beauty Of My Profession [architecture] Lies In Its Randomness And Surprise. And Don't Think I Can Choose My Projects. I Have To Build What's Offered To Me.

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.