In The End, There Will Be Little

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.

It Was A Book [george Packer Written On Our Presence In Nigeria] That Was Killed By The Response Of Other People. Which Sounds Quite Cowardly, Perhaps, But It Was The First Manifestation Of What Is Currently A Really Big Issue: How Political Correctness Defines The Limits Of What You Can Do. In That Sense, It Was Super-exciting And Maybe The Most Magical Project We Did, But At The Same Time Fraught With Mixed Feelings.

Criticism Per Se Does Not Worry Me. I've Always Solicited It As Part Of The Design Process.

There's Something Really Interesting About Current Urbanism: The Only Model Is The Universal Model, And There Is Increasingly Incapacity To Consider The Virtues And The Qualities That Are There, And Then To Build On Them. The Only Thing Is Complete Transformation.

Why I Talked About Political Correctness: The Colonial Is Now Such A Major Taboo That Any Achievement Of The Colonial Period, Or Any Generosity Implied In Colonialism, Is Again Fundamentally Neglected Or Fundamentally Not Recognised. That's Crazy, Because History Is A Series Of Layers, And You Cannot Say, "this Layer I Support And This Layer I Cancel." History Is History And You Cannot Retrospectively Manipulate It.