The Stronger The Identity, The

Talk About Beauty And You Get Boring Answers, But Talk About Ugliness And Things Get Interesting.

I'd Say That My Profession Ends Where Architectural Thinking Ends - Architectural Thinking In Terms Of Thinking About Programs And Organizational Structure. These Abstractions Play A Role In Many Other Disciplines, And Those Disciplines Are Now Defining Their 'architectures' As Well.

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.

The Real Thing We Tried To Look At Is What Happens To A Society When The State Is Absent. At That Point, The State Had Really Withdrawn From Lagos; The City Was Left To Its Own Devices, Both In Terms Of Money And Services. That, By Definition, Created An Unbelievable Proliferation Of Independent Agency: Each Citizen Needed To Take, In Any Day, Maybe 400 Or 500 Independent Decisions On How To Survive That Extremely Complex System.

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.