Lagos Was The Ultimate Dysfunctional City -

The Real Thing We Tried To Look At Is What Happens To A Society When The State Is Absent. At That Point, The State Had Really Withdrawn From Lagos; The City Was Left To Its Own Devices, Both In Terms Of Money And Services. That, By Definition, Created An Unbelievable Proliferation Of Independent Agency: Each Citizen Needed To Take, In Any Day, Maybe 400 Or 500 Independent Decisions On How To Survive That Extremely Complex System.

There's Nothing Dutch About My Architecture.

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.

I Think One Of The Important Evolutions Is That We No Longer Feel Compulsively The Need To Argue, Or To Justify Things On A Kind Of Rational Level. We Are Much More Willing To Admit That Certain Things Are Completely Instinctive And Others Are Really Intellectual.

Evil Can Also Be Beautiful. The Coliseum In Rome, For Example, A Wonderful Structure With An Awful Past. Just Think About The Bloody Gladiator Fights There.