When Shopping Was Still Connected To The

Manhattan Has No Choice But The Skyward Extrusion Of The Grid Itself; Only The Skyscraper Offers Business The Wide-open Spaces Of A Man-made Wild West, A Frontier In The Sky.

The Real Thing We Tried To Look At Is What Happens To A Society When The State Is Absent. At That Point, The State Had Really Withdrawn From Lagos; The City Was Left To Its Own Devices, Both In Terms Of Money And Services. That, By Definition, Created An Unbelievable Proliferation Of Independent Agency: Each Citizen Needed To Take, In Any Day, Maybe 400 Or 500 Independent Decisions On How To Survive That Extremely Complex System.

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.

Lagos Was The Ultimate Dysfunctional City - But Actually, In Terms Of All The Initiatives And Ingenuity, It Mobilised An Incredibly Beautiful, Almost Utopian Landscape Of Independence And Agency.

As More And More Architecture Is Finally Unmasked As The Mere Organization Of Flow - Shopping Centers, Airports - It Is Evident That Circulation Is What Makes Or Breaks Public Architecture.