A Building Has At Least Two Lives

Architecture Is A Dangerous Mix Of Power And Importance.

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.

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 At That Point, The State Had Really Withdrawn From Lagos; The City Was Left To Its Own Devices, Both In Terms Of Money And Services.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.

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.

Most Old Cities Are Now Sclerotic Machines That Dispense Known Qualities In Ever-greater Quantities, Instead Of Laboratories Of The Uncertain. Only The Skyscraper Offers Business The Wide-open Spaces Of A Man-made Wild West, A Frontier In The Sky.