Not many architects have the luxury to reject significant things.

If you have this reputation you can sit back and endure it, or you can try to do things with it.

Our society can no longer tolerate ugliness. You see that in cars, sofas and women. [But] ugliness also has a right to exist.

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.

I wanted to disconnect from contemporary architecture

The acceptance of certain realities doesn't preclude idealism. It can lead to certain breakthroughs.

People can inhabit anything. And they can be miserable in anything and ecstatic in anything. More and more I think that architecture has nothing to do with it. Of course, that's both liberating and alarming.