Find Optimism In The Inevitable.

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.

At 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.

The Good Is Not A Category That Interests Me.

The Grid Makes The History Of Architecture And All Previous Lessons Of Urbanism Irrelevant. It Forces Manhattan's Builders To Develop A New System Of Formal Values, To Invent Strategies For The Distinction Of One Block From Another. The Grid's Two-dimensional Discipline Also Creates Undreamt-of Freedom For Three-dimensional Anarchy. The Grid Defines A New Balance Between Control And De-control In Which The City Can Be At The Same Time Ordered And Fluid, A Metropolis Of Rigid Chaos.

There's Nothing Dutch About My Architecture.