The luxury of our position now is that we can almost assemble any team to address any issue.

I studied in London in 1968. Our school had a separate department of tropical architecture. Of course it was totally unfashionable, partly because nobody wanted to think about colonialism, but basically what you learned there was that, OK, the sun is here, so you should create natural ventilation here - an unbelievable amount of really sound principles that have been completely abandoned, so now everything is air conditioned with big machines.

Lagos has also had a particular effect on my career. I was there early, and although it was a courageous step to go there and invest on this scale - I went there maybe 20 times - it's also been also super-controversial. There's an old school of thought that somebody like me has no place to go there.Because of colonialism and so on.

Architects work in two ways. One is to respond precisely to a client's needs or demands. Another is to look at what the client asks and reinterpret it.

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.

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 Lagos there's a really strong case to resurrect strong parts. Embedded in all of it are some amazing pieces of planning, amazing pieces of engineering and interaction. For instance, the campus of Lagos University is stunningly beautiful, efficient and generous, and that needs to be recognised and preserved.