There Are Essentially Two Possibilities. One Is

I Wanted To Disconnect From Contemporary 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.

In Lagos There's A Really Strong Case To Resurrect Strong Parts. Embedded In All Of It Are Some Amazing Pieces Of Planning, Amazing Pieces Of Engineering And Interaction. For Instance, The Campus Of Lagos University Is Stunningly Beautiful, Efficient And Generous, And That Needs To Be Recognised And Preserved.

We Discovered A Person In Lagos Who Had A Fish Stall, And Within A Single Square Metre She Carried Two Children All The Way To Harvard. She Supported An Unbelievable Escape Of Her Children Into Education. In That Sense It Was A City Completed Pixillated, And Every Pixel Contained Amazing Stories.

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.