Architecture is a rare collective profession: it's always exercised by groups. There is an essential modesty, which is a complete contradiction to th….

That has been another interesting discovery: that basically a city [Lagos] could recover from a really deep, deep, deep pit..

Influence is a very unpleasant subject and I deal with it in a maybe irresponsible way, which is to really ignore it. It would be a nightmare if we s….

Lagos has also had a particular effect on my career. I was there early, and although it was a courageous step to go there and invest on this scale - ….

Find optimism in the inevitable..

Our society can no longer tolerate ugliness. You see that in cars, sofas and women. [But] ugliness also has a right to exist..

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 At that point, the state had really withdrawn from Lagos; t….

The areas of consensus shift unbelievably fast; the bubbles of certainty are constantly exploding..

In the end, there will be little else for us to do but shop..

I'd say that my profession ends where architectural thinking ends - architectural thinking in terms of thinking about programs and organizational str….

In a script, you have to link various episodes together, you have to generate suspense and you have to assemble things - through editing, for example….

Journalists seem mostly interested in what brand of shoes I wear..

I think one of the important evolutions is that we no longer feel compulsively the need to argue, or to justify things on a kind of rational level. W….

I like fashion, whether or not it's overpriced, because it creates a sense of the sublime with relatively few means..

We say we want to create beauty, identity, quality, singularity. And yet, maybe in truth these cities that we have are desired. Maybe their very char….

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 scatte….

Lagos was the ultimate dysfunctional city - but actually, in terms of all the initiatives and ingenuity, it mobilised an incredibly beautiful, almost….

The luxury of our position now is that we can almost assemble any team to address any issue..

The institutions are working better now, the banks are much more functional. At this time, 1997, there were no mobile phones! It's a whole different ….

Most old cities are now sclerotic machines that dispense known qualities in ever-greater quantities, instead of laboratories of the uncertain. Only t….

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