Nobody Should Be Anything, But Because I

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.

We Discovered A Person In Lagos Who Had A Fish Stall, And Within A Single Square Metre She Carried Two Children All The Way To Harvard. She Supported An Unbelievable Escape Of Her Children Into Education. In That Sense It Was A City Completed Pixillated, And Every Pixel Contained Amazing Stories.

When Air Conditioning, Escalators, And Advertising Appeared, Shopping Expanded Its Scale, But Also Limited Its Spontaneity. And It Became Much More Predictable, Almost Scientific. What Had Once Been The Most Surprising Became The Most Manipulated.

In This Branch Of Utopian Real Estate, Architecture Is No Longer The Art Of Designing Buildings So Much As The Brutal Skyward Extrusion Of Whatever Site The Developer Has Managed To Assemble.

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.