In The End, There Will Be Little

Nigeria Was A Blank On The Map - There Weren't Even Any Maps. The Us State Department, Everyone Said Don't Go There. It Was Courageous Of Harvard University: The Notion Was That We Would Match Harvard Students With Nigerian Students, So That Every Student Would Have A Guide, Creating A Guarantee Of Intimacy With The City.

That Has Been Another Interesting Discovery: That Basically A City [lagos] Could Recover From A Really Deep, Deep, Deep Pit.

Architecture Is A Rare Collective Profession: It's Always Exercised By Groups. There Is An Essential Modesty, Which Is A Complete Contradiction To The Notion Of A Star.

There Are Essentially Two Possibilities. One Is To Be, Shall We Say, An Average Architect And Do The Same Thing Everywhere. The Other Is To Let Yourself Be Inspired And Even Changed By The Unique Qualities Of The Place Where You're Building. We Always Try To Take The Second Approach.

I Studied In London In 1968. Our School Had A Separate Department Of Tropical Architecture. Of Course It Was Totally Unfashionable, Partly Because Nobody Wanted To Think About Colonialism, But Basically What You Learned There Was That, Ok, The Sun Is Here, So You Should Create Natural Ventilation Here - An Unbelievable Amount Of Really Sound Principles That Have Been Completely Abandoned, So Now Everything Is Air Conditioned With Big Machines.