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

We say we want to create beauty, identity, quality, singularity. And yet, maybe in truth these cities that we have are desired. Maybe their very characterlessness provides the best context for living.

The real thing we tried to look at is what happens to a society when the state is absent. At that point, the state had really withdrawn from Lagos; the city was left to its own devices, both in terms of money and services. That, by definition, created an unbelievable proliferation of independent agency: each citizen needed to take, in any day, maybe 400 or 500 independent decisions on how to survive that extremely complex system.

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.

Sustainability has become an ornament.

Evil can also be beautiful. The Coliseum in Rome, for example, a wonderful structure with an awful past. Just think about the bloody gladiator fights there.

Japan lives with drastic segregation between the sublime, the ugly, and the utterly without qualities. Dominance of the last 2 categories makes mere presence of the first stunning: when beauty 'happens', it is absolutely surprising.