The first time I met the consummate architect that goes by the name James George, he informed me that he’d crossed the third mainland bridge on a motorbike from Victoria Island to get to Ikeja to meet me. Six months afterwards, we were working on a book. About a year later, we were working on a conceptual intervention for the city of Lagos with the proposed 4th mainland bridge as a take off point, thoughts from which informed an exhibition at Goethe Institut, Lagos which opened on the 18th of July. The Lagos: Absence of Systems exhibition featured a pre-opening seminar on the systemic / infrastructural challenges of running a Mega City like Lagos during which participants drawn from the media, key government agencies and professionals in the built industry mapped key infrastructural areas of Housing, Waste Disposal and Transportation, highlighting problems and proffering solutions. The exhibition to which the preceding conference served as a backdrop has been described as a fantasy take on resolving some of the issues discussed. For a nation in dire need of re-imagination, fantasy takes might not be that much of the impractical schemes that they tend to be cartegorised as; they might as well be the right panacea for Lagos to lift it out of the doldrums, placing the city on the same global reckoning as contemporary cities like Dubai and Beijing where fantasy has become commonplace.
Ayodele Arigbabu and Nike Fagade sat James George down for questioning recently on the rationale behind the exhibition.
Why the exhibition?
Exhibitions are ways to reach out to people when ideas have reached a point where they can become realised as cogent concepts. We’ve been working on these ideas for a while now and we thought that it will be best to use an exhibition to take it from research to buildable concept. Given that Lagos is developing at the rate it is, we think right now that its a nice idea to have research in this way put on the mainstream, to give policy makers, architects, designers and ideas people around the nation who have things to do with Lagos, a better perspective on how to solve problems in Lagos.
We had to publish an idea. There are two ways- either you make it public by exhibition or you write a book. We wrote a book but we haven’t published it yet. The exhibition just served as a point of contact between us and the public about an idea that has been worked out over years and can affect lives in Lagos. The exhibition was designed to create a shock reaction with the public, to make people realise that urban plans and designs can be better and to help us to give a leeway to policy makers to help them rethink their approach to policy formulation for urban development. So, I’ll say that the exhibition is more or less a bridge to a bigger scheme of implementation as the case may be.
What’s the central idea behind the project?
We are trying to stitch the two different sides of Lagos into one. The idea is to create an organism that stitches the disparate sides together. Now, what we’ve done is to rely on existing paradigms of housing and how people view urban infrastructure of Lagos and re-engineer it back into the city project. You will find that people live under bridges as a fact in Lagos, so if those things are studied properly, the result wouldn’t be far from what the Lagos project is. We are trying to create a light ground for Lagos using existing paradigms of urban infrastructure, using existing typologies of urban infrastructure to create new ways of building within the city. The project also serves as a point where ideas are gathered theoretically for solutions to be created for Lagos, in future, by other people. So, I’ll say the Lagos project is necessary at this time to enable the rest of the thinking population of Lagos to rethink the other means.
Why the focus on the fourth mainland bridge?
The fourth mainland bridge is actually a means to an end in this whole discussion. We discovered the bridge system that we call the habitable business bridge and we needed a bridge to put it on. Fourth Mainland Bridge is going to get built so if we put our thinking process on the fourth mainland bridge, we get the Lagos project which brings in elements which are not usually on bridges, into the bridge to create taxable income for the government, from construction and from habitation. The fourth mainland bridge is extremely short. It’s about 3 to 4 kilometres long. It’s an area where an urban intervention would create a large volume of traffic for commerce and residential uses and things like that. We thought to use that bridge because of those reasons. The fourth mainland bridge as it is right now is the stitch that Lagos needs to tie the mainland and the island. So if we create an organism on that stitch, we’ll be shortening distances of travel, creating a secure bridge that is not only for travel, putting people in places where they weren’t before. Moreover, we’ll be creating ‘land’ on the lagoon which is very necessary because as it’s always said, land is depleting at an alarming rate
We’ll be creating ‘land’ in the air. We are building concrete spaces to a certain percentage and letting people develop the rest at their time for housing. So you get a piece of ‘land’, the same way you buy a plot from government, but it’s in the air, over water and you can develop it one room at a time until that point is reached where it can become personalised. Another intervention would be bringing offices and office complex into the bridge. How we see it is that not only people who live on the bridge work on the bridge but we see it as a midway point between the island and the mainland. So this organism which we are creating has one place as the head, the other is the anus. At the anus, dirt is dumped, at the head business is done. This spine now serves to shorten distance between the two. People don’t have to travel all the way to the mainland anymore to get the things they want or travel to the island to get things from Shoprite. It’s a nice midpoint between being on the island and being on the mainland. It enables Lagos to work more like an organism.
How wide is the fourth mainland bridge to accommodate all these components?
We worked with a 60 metres dimension which is about twice the third mainland bridge if I’m not mistaken. 60 metres will mean that we have through it approximately 10 metres or 11 metres each and then a central core. We created a structure that all the component parts are supported differently but there’s a general support system so that when trains pass the centre of the structure, it does not cause any vibration. When cars pass at high speed, they do not disturb the train traffic. When BRT busses stop, the train passing would not be causing vibration that can make it tumble because there’s a lot of traffic happening there, there are 2100 homes, 240 square meters of office spacing for medium and small scale businesses and there’s a whole 60 meters/ 30 meters space up there for traders and things like that.
How long will it take to get this fourth mainland bridge project in Place?
It will take about 2 years to gather all the data to a point where we can say that the drawings, designs and the thinking processes and policies required are complete because when that’s done, then people would invest. Then the project can start.
Why Lagos?
First, I’ll say the cliché. Lagos has about seventeen point something million people. Then came international attention. The Dutch architect and theorist Rem Koolhaas came to Lagos a while ago to talk about this urban menace. In my own sense of it, I think Lagos has provided people like us with the leeway to think in a way that hasn’t been thought of before in Nigeria. So we are creating a new architecture in a place where architecture is really needed because most of the things that go up today in the name of architecture are deplorable and an intervention has to be given at this point. So I think from Lagos, things will spread like cancer around the country so we have to start where it’s dominant and then spread out from there. Lagos needs development. It can’t cope with the number of people it has now and it’s going to increase with about 21 people an hour for the next 9 years so we are talking about 25/ 26 million people in 9 years. That’s an extra 9 million people that we are trying to cater for. Government schemes are catering for one point something million people in all the extensions so, there’s still 8 point something million floating population that has to be catered for. Lagos needs thinkers to bring to bear ways that those people can be catered for in housing, infrastructure, business and transportation. Lagos depends on its people for survival and we have to be able to create a point where people can go to in Lagos.
What was the methodology by which you arrived at the product in terms of the design?
Ayo Arigbabu and I argued for a long time. Thanks to Azu for giving us the space to beat ourselves up and argue. We were arguing about paradigms that we already understood, about data that we had collected. Well, I don’t know about Ayo, Ayo has his own ways of collecting data but I’ve collected data from studying how people use the city and the infrastructure in the city. We’ve always had thoughts, right from where we met each other, about the city. We also tried to put together a manual of some sorts from his discourses and my own discourses of how the city can be developed based on ideas and things like that. It’s an ideological process that’s based on research and plenty of calculations on my part that led to what can be seen now as the habitable bridge project.
The habitable bridge project, does it not repeat what western thinkers have done in the past in trying to apply broad sweeping paradigm to urban regeneration or urban design that have been proven over time not to work in some instances...that essentially you might just be proposing a white elephant project to solve an urban menace or perhaps you are creating another urban menace in the same tone?
Le Corbusier created an urban menace in India. He created a city, I’m creating a stitch. There’s a big difference between a city and a stitch. A city houses people in droves, a stitch houses a chosen number of people. We are talking about 6,300 people. The percentage of error, when you deal with 3 kilometres of space on a 60 meter strip compared to when you deal with a whole city, is very minimal. I’m not suggesting ideas that people will live by, I’m not suggesting grid iron patterns by which you build your houses; in fact I’m really not suggesting anything. I’m just saying we can do it better. This is how we do it, here’s land to do what you want to do. But while you do what you want to do, you could have done it like this because if you do it like this, you’ll have more air flow, light and things like that. So, I’m creating a stage, not a city. I’ll create cities maybe when I’m 50 but right now, I’m creating a stage because that’s what Lagos needs. It’s a self- sustaining commune that still needs a Lagos scape as we call it, to survive because if you divorce what we are creating from Lamgbasa or Ikorodu, it can’t exist in isolation. So either way, it has to be stitched down to the cities and I think that stitching process will serve to sweep away all that broad minded urban thinking that Jane Jacobs talked about in her book. We are not proposing that kind of development. I think we are proposing something more humane; because of the scale and conceptual process behind it, it had to see the humanness. But as time goes on, it will be just as humane as any other project there can be.
Your research extends into the economics of: 1. Erecting structures- because you are building over 3 kilometres of space, and 2. The economics of how the structure sustains itself over time. Did your research attempt to cover those grounds?
We’re recreating two ways of solving that problem. First of all, we’re creating an energy park on the roof that provides for lighting through solar panels and wind turbines and then we are creating a biomass base at the base of the structure where all waste would go through and be converted to gas for cooking and non- biodegradables can be carted off via the lagoon. Based on those precepts and the way we were handling the cross ventilation programmes and things like that, based on those precepts, the structure will be able to maintain itself over time. The solar panels are right there on the roof so that they can be washed off by rain and reduce maintenance cost. Now, the rain that washes off from the solar panel can be gathered through the openings in the roof, at the central area of the building as gray water to provide for watering the areas that need watering within the structure because there’s a buffer zone right in the centre of the structure. The biomass and the waste water go down through the structure to the base to be converted to gas. So the structure is an organism as I said earlier. It sorts of breaths on its own and solves its own problems hopefully.
Now the economics of the structural balance as you say, the structure is a very complex structure but the good thing about complexity in this case is that we are bringing in technology that can be reused in smaller scale around Lagos. So we are hoping to create urban development and infrastructural development by creating a very complex project. The structure is in two parts- the structure itself that carries the building and the bridge. And there’s a dampening system that runs around the bridge to take away vibrations and all of that. With time, we’ll work on a more elaborate structural discourse that can be talked about in public. But for now, I think we’ve reached where the architect’s mind can grasp conveniently, the rest is engineering.
Beyond the exhibition, what do you hope to achieve by this project?
I remember discussing with Ayo and also listening to Tupac at one time like he said he isn’t the guy that changes the world but he likes to be the spark in the guy’s mind that changes the world. So this is the spark. We are striking off a brand new architectural design typology and a brand new urban design typology. We are saying architecture can be done better we are doing architecture on a scale that no Nigerian has thought of before. We are bringing chaos into urbanism, call it chaos scale urbanism. We are saying that professionalism, architecture and urbanism can be changed by sheer thinking. This is the beginning of great things; this is the beginning of great new architecture and architectural thinking in Nigeria. I’m glad and I’m very sure Ayo is glad also to be at the forefront of it. I think that we will achieve, we will bring in architects from schools and all, that can produce true, great architecture that is indigenous and yet uses technology to its ultimate end. That’s fantastic to achieve from an exhibition.
Who exactly are you?
I’m James George. I was not born in Lagos and I’ve lived all my life away from Lagos. I went to Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, I have double degrees in Architecture from ABU. I did my thesis on Lagos titled– Greater Lagos. I got interested in paradigms in the course of my research for my thesis. I wrote a book, came to Lagos to settle and I met Ayo Arigbabu who wouldn’t let me sleep. Here we are now.
