One cannot completely avoid this landmark character with large buildings such as these. But the city itself is also gigantic.

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.

A building has at least two lives - the one imagined by its maker and the life it lives afterward - and they are never the same.

The stronger the identity, the more it imprisons, the more it resists expansion, interpretation, renewal, contradiction.

The great problem of the concert hall is that the shoebox is the ideal shape for acoustics but that no architect worth their names wants to build a shoebox.

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.

You need to look at inequality as a typical condition of modern society.