Nigeria Was A Blank On The Map

Lagos Was Not Very Inviting Even To Lagosians. It Was Considered A No-go Zone, Almost In Its Entirety.

All Important Architecture Of The Last Century Was Strongly Influenced By Political Systems. Look At The Soviet System, With Its Constructivism And Stalinism, Weimer With Its Modern Style, Mussolini And, Of Course, The Nazis And Albert Speer's Colossal Structures. Today's Architecture Is Subservient To The Market And Its Terms. The Market Has Supplanted Ideology. Architecture Has Turned Into A Spectacle. It Has To Package Itself And No Longer Has Significance As Anything But A Landmark.

People Can Inhabit Anything. And They Can Be Miserable In Anything And Ecstatic In Anything. More And More I Think That Architecture Has Nothing To Do With It. Of Course, That's Both Liberating And Alarming.

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.

I'd Say That My Profession Ends Where Architectural Thinking Ends - Architectural Thinking In Terms Of Thinking About Programs And Organizational Structure. These Abstractions Play A Role In Many Other Disciplines, And Those Disciplines Are Now Defining Their 'architectures' As Well.