In 1997 two architects set out to rethink Lagos, an African megacity that had been largely abandoned by the state. Amid the apparent chaos and crime, they discovered remarkable patterns of organisation. Two decades later, Rem Koolhaas and Kunlé Adeyemi discuss the past, present and future of the city – and reveal why their own project never saw the light of day

Koolhaas and Adeyemi rented a helicopter to discern patterns in the apparent Lagos chaos.
Koolhaas and Adeyemi rented a helicopter to discern patterns in the apparent Lagos chaos. - .... KA: But you took a lot of pride in that notion that you could actually survive in Lagos. This place that was very difficult to live in also offered up a lot of opportunities. RK: It was a kind of narcissism of difficulty, so in that sense it was almost an emancipation machine. GC: How did it affect your work? RK: Kunlé’s a Lagosian now [Adeyemi grew up in Kaduna in northern Nigeria] and he’s building a career there. But 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 – I went there maybe 20 times – it’s also been also super-controversial. There’s an old school of thought that somebody like me has no place to go there. GC: Because you’re not Nigerian. RK: Yeah, because of colonialism and so on ... [The American journalist] George Packer saw our presence there as just kind of ‘slumming it’. He described it as tourism by car, and then ultimately by helicopter. But it was not some kind of exotic excursion. It was a collaborative effort to clarify, understand and educate. KA: I remember, for a long time you didn’t actually want to intervene. The first project we did [the fourth mainland bridge proposal], it was through a lot of my interests that Rem agreed to it – there was never an intention to immediately intervene. RK: Because of that innuendo, in the end we didn’t publish. It was a book that was killed by the response of other people. Which sounds quite cowardly, perhaps, but it was the first manifestation of what is currently a really big issue: how political correctness defines the limits of what you can do. In that sense, it was super-exciting and maybe the most magical project we did, but at the same time fraught with mixed feelings. .... © Rem Koolhaas/OMA

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GC: Did you learn any lessons from Lagos that you could apply to other cities?

RK: 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. That was why the title [of the unpublished book] became Lagos: How it Works, because it 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.

KA: Self-organisation ...

RK: For example, there was this railroad [he draws]. Initially the trains drove with some frequency, but the frequency diminished to the point where there were only two trains a day. However, the line had created a lot of communities, and therefore density – so every time the train was not driving, this whole area became a marketplace. At some point the train would drive, but at such a pace that you could sell things to the passengers as it went along – so the slowness was very functional in terms of creating opportunity of interaction and trade.

We also discovered a person 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.

KA: Lagos is a city that’s very anxious – probably back then a lot more than it is now. Everyone is always in a hurry. Everyone needs to get ahead of the other.

GC: Is it a kind of capitalist utopia?

RK: I don’t think so. It’s all about survival.

KA: The key thing was: that’s the organisation; that’s the birth of a growing city. Lagos back then was 10-12 million people.

RK: It looks like total chaos, but after a while you learn to recognise that it’s not total chaos, because here are green things together, here are rusty things together, here are plastic things together. There’s a constant ordering going on, and a constant disordering at the same time.

KA: If you just look at this image of the market [pictured below] without the lines drawn on, you get a sense that nothing’s happening, there’s no order. But then you see people selling tomatoes on one line, and everyone is organised across their little paths ...

GC: Yet with no one actually ordering it?

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KA: Certainly in the remnants and fragments of the infrastructure produced in the colonial era, one can really see how they’ve been useful in taking the city to a certain extent. Now, maybe the transformation has not been thought out carefully, but it’s been very instrumental for the development of the city and it’s not something we can completely erase.

RK: 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.

Everyone is talking about sustainability and resilience, yet all that knowledge is thrown in the bin. [Lagos is] a unique case, but also a test case. It’s unbelievably unique, but also it’s now considered with a number of really generic opinions, generic solution, generic expectations.

KA: That’s so true. My father was one of the first modernist architects who also worked with the colonial or post-colonial architects. He started his practice in the early 1960s. I grew up understanding architecture by understanding the environment: cross-ventilation was very important – the sun, the orientation of the building, the garden, the space, everything was completely thought out.

RK: Coherent and mutually reinforcing.

KA: He did large-scale buildings and still they needed to be naturally ventilated. So there’s a lot in the history – whether it’s local history, or histories that have been imported, international practices – that have been very useful, and that we are forgetting.

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