We live in an almost perfect stillness and work with incredible urgency.

In this branch of utopian real estate, architecture is no longer the art of designing buildings so much as the brutal skyward extrusion of whatever site the developer has managed to assemble.

The areas of consensus shift unbelievably fast; the bubbles of certainty are constantly exploding.

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

The word 'celebrity' and the word 'architect' are basically incompatible.

Nigeria was a blank on the map - there weren't even any maps. The US State Department, everyone said don't go there. It was courageous of Harvard University: the notion was that we would match Harvard students with Nigerian students, so that every student would have a guide, creating a guarantee of intimacy with the city.

There are essentially two possibilities. One is to be, shall we say, an average architect and do the same thing everywhere. The other is to let yourself be inspired and even changed by the unique qualities of the place where you're building. We always try to take the second approach.