In The End, There Will Be Little

The Good Is Not A Category That Interests Me.

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.

Each Building Has To Be Beautiful, But Cheap And Fast, But It Lasts Forever. That Is Already An Incredible Battery Of Seemingly Contradictory Demands. So Yes, I'm Definitely Perhaps Contradictory Person, But I Operate In Very Contradictory Times.

Any Architectural Project We Do Takes At Least Four Or Five Years, So Increasingly There Is A Discrepancy Between The Acceleration Of Culture And The Continuing Slowness Of Architecture.

When We Went In The Late 1990s, Nigeria Was Still In A Dictatorship. So We Didn't Go With A Mission. It Started Really With A Sort Of Blankness And Open-endedness.