Find Optimism In The Inevitable.

Manhattan Has No Choice But The Skyward Extrusion Of The Grid Itself; Only The Skyscraper Offers Business The Wide-open Spaces Of A Man-made Wild West, A Frontier In The Sky.

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.

The Thing Is That I Have A Really Intense, Almost Compulsive Need To Record. But It Doesn't End There, Because What I Record Is Somehow Transformed Into A Creative Thing. There Is A Continuity. Recording Is The Beginning Of A Conceptual Production. I Am Somehow Collapsing The Two - Recording And Producing - Into A Single Event.

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.

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.