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

Nigeria [in 1990] was all rumour, an unbelievable amount of rumour - largely about crime and almost mythical manifestations of evil.

Each building has to be beautiful, but cheap and fast, but it lasts forever. That is already an incredible battery of seemingly contradictory demands. So yes, I'm definitely perhaps contradictory person, but I operate in very contradictory times.

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.

Any architectural project we do takes at least four or five years, so increasingly there is a discrepancy between the acceleration of culture and the continuing slowness of architecture.

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.

The beauty of my profession [architecture] lies in its randomness and surprise. And don't think I can choose my projects. I have to build what's offered to me.