That has been another interesting discovery: that basically a city [Lagos] could recover from a really deep, deep, deep pit.

In a script, you have to link various episodes together, you have to generate suspense and you have to assemble things - through editing, for example. It's exactly the same in architecture. Architects also put together spatial episodes to make sequences.

In the end, there will be little else for us to do but shop.

It was a book [George Packer written on our presence in Nigeria] that was killed by the response of other people. Which sounds quite cowardly, perhaps, but it was the first manifestation of what is currently a really big issue: how political correctness defines the limits of what you can do. In that sense, it was super-exciting and maybe the most magical project we did, but at the same time fraught with mixed feelings.

I am incredibly bad at predicting the future; I am only smart enough to observe the present and listen to my intuition about tendencies.

One cannot completely avoid this landmark character with large buildings such as these. But the city itself is also gigantic.

The institutions are working better now, the banks are much more functional. At this time, 1997, there were no mobile phones! It's a whole different thing now with mobile phones: technology has created a form of regulation, because people can actually talk to each other a lot more.