There's something really interesting about current urbanism: the only model is the universal model, and there is increasingly incapacity to consider the virtues and the qualities that are there, and then to build on them. The only thing is complete transformation.

The good is not a category that interests me.

When 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.

If you have this reputation you can sit back and endure it, or you can try to do things with it.

Manhattan is an accumulation of possible disasters that never happen.

Our society can no longer tolerate ugliness. You see that in cars, sofas and women. [But] ugliness also has a right to exist.

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