Find Optimism In The Inevitable.

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.

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.

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.

Manhattan Has Generated A Shameless Architecture That Has Been Loved In Direct Proportion To Its Defiant Lack Of Self-hatred, Has Been Respected Exactly To The Degree That It Went Too Far.

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.