Find Optimism In The Inevitable.

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.

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. We Are Much More Willing To Admit That Certain Things Are Completely Instinctive And Others Are Really Intellectual.

The People From The Suburbs Are Bringing Along Their Suburban Values: Cleanliness, Orderliness, Safety - Dullness, In Other Words. As A Result, Urban Areas Are Being Hollowed Out. Just Look At Times Square In New York. No More Sex Shops, No Drugs, No Homeless People. The Area Is Clinically Clean And Incredibly Dull.

Evil Can Also Be Beautiful. The Coliseum In Rome, For Example, A Wonderful Structure With An Awful Past. Just Think About The Bloody Gladiator Fights There.

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 At That Point, The State Had Really Withdrawn From Lagos; The City Was Left To Its Own Devices, Both In Terms Of Money And Services.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