Lagos was a city that had been turned against itself. There was a bridge that became the perfect trap for crimes, which began with nails being scattered to cause flat tyres. If the driver stopped, the car would be dismantled in 20 minutes and the parts thrown overboard [to people waiting below]. The system had turned into a kind of destructive device that could be used against people. That was the narrative.
Rem KoolhaasDesigns are increasingly winning competitions because they are literally green, and because somewhere they feature a small windmill.
Rem KoolhaasWhen we went in the late 1990s, Nigeria was still in a dictatorship. So we didn't go with a mission. It started really with a sort of blankness and open-endedness.
Rem KoolhaasAt that time [90th in Lagos], if you drove through the city, you drove through a foreground that always seemed to be incredibly dramatic and incredibly agonised - smoking, burning, incredible compression. In the first year we stayed on the ground and went everywhere. But then in order to discover whether this was the whole story, we rented a helicopter. And we began to understand that this is not chaos but a highly modern system that had been abandoned, then at some point went into reversal, then slowly came out of it.
Rem Koolhaas