Everyone is talking about sustainability and resilience, yet all that knowledge is thrown in the bin. [Lagos is] a unique case, but also a test case. It's unbelievably unique, but also it's now considered with a number of really generic opinions, generic solution, generic expectations.

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

Nobody should be anything, but because I once had a different profession and I'm interested in writing, I took it upon me.

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.

I like fashion, whether or not it's overpriced, because it creates a sense of the sublime with relatively few means.

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

A building has at least two lives - the one imagined by its maker and the life it lives afterward - and they are never the same.