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.

I wanted to disconnect from contemporary architecture

Lagos was not very inviting even to Lagosians. It was considered a no-go zone, almost in its entirety.

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.

That has been my entire life story. Running against the current and running with the current. Sometimes running with the current is underestimated. The acceptance of certain realities doesn’t preclude idealism. It can lead to certain breakthroughs.

Manhattan is an accumulation of possible disasters that never happen.

There's nothing Dutch about my architecture.