Art & the Artist Interiors & Design

Architect Q&A: David Adjaye, OBE

A celebrated polymath, David Adjaye is acclaimed not only for his innovative architecture, but also for his furniture and textile designs

Born in Tanzania in 1966, as a child David Adjaye also lived in Egypt, Yemen, and Lebanon before settling with his family in Britain when he was nine years old. In 1994 he set up his first office, which was then reformed as Adjaye Associates in 2000. Since then he has won several prestigious commissions, including the Nobel Peace Center in Oslo, Norway, and has received several awards, among them the title of OBE from the Queen of England in 2007 for services to British architecture.

A keynote speaker at Christie’s International Real Estate’s 2016 conference in Dublin, Adjaye tells Luxury Defined about his early influences, signature style, and past and future projects.

The Nobel Peace Center, designed by David Adjaye, is located in the former Oslo West train station building, dating from 1872. Photograph: Tim Soar. Banner image: Adjaye's current project on London's Piccadilly that will include retail and residential areas, as well as a hotel.
The Nobel Peace Center, designed by David Adjaye, is located in the former Oslo West train station building, dating from 1872. Photograph: Tim Soar. Banner image: Adjaye's current project on London's Piccadilly that will include retail and residential areas, as well as a hotel.

What are your earliest memories of/encounters with architecture?
I remember very clearly as a young child seeing the metropolitan skyline of Nairobi, which, in the 1960s, was the incredible new modern city in Africa. It filled me with feelings of possibility and progress; it was one of the first moments that I remember experiencing the power of architecture to inspire, to speak about culture in a tangible way.

My public work dissolves barriers, it tries to encourage permeability

You’ve worked around the world on residential and commercial projects. How are they different?
The private realm is a kind of retreat from the urbanity of the city. I have explored this with the houses I have designed in London and New York. The façades often appear impermeable and ambiguous. Once inside, however, the buildings unfold to establish a parallel, more tranquil reality. I tend to set this idea of private retreat against the discourse of public engagement. My public work dissolves barriers, it tries to encourage permeability. In my commercial projects, I am always looking for opportunities to establish a cultural and social intersection that enhances the brief. For instance, with my Aïshti project in Beirut, I designed a new landscape element that creates a public seaside promenade allowing the residents of the city to experience its incredible seafront in a way that was previously inaccessible. Finding ways to create this dialogue and contribution is very important to me.

In 2015, Lebanese luxury department store Aïshti opened the Aïshti Foundation in Beirut. The Adjaye-designed building is wrapped in zigzagging red aluminum tubes, intended to resemble mashrabiya – windows overlaid with carved wooden latticework panels often used in traditional Arabic architecture. Photograph: Guillaume Ziccarelli
In 2015, Lebanese luxury department store Aïshti opened the Aïshti Foundation in Beirut. The Adjaye-designed building is wrapped in zigzagging red aluminum tubes, intended to resemble mashrabiya – windows overlaid with carved wooden latticework panels often used in traditional Arabic architecture. Photograph: Guillaume Ziccarelli

You can obviously now pick and choose your commissions – what is it about a project that persuades you to say “yes”?
I am interested in projects that can inspire people and empower communities. I believe our ideas about a civilized world are manifested through the architecture we make. Ideas about access and personal freedoms are embedded. For me, this is the primary act of architecture: to be socially edifying and socially liberating. It is an emancipatory form, which affects the politics of progression. That is really the core of my work. When it doesn’t have that quality, I am less interested, I don’t feel it is what architecture should be about.

I am interested in projects that can inspire people and empower communities

What is the Adjaye way of working?
My work is about the specifics of culture, place, geography…every context is different, and every context has a new scenario. Rather than searching for the universal, I look for the specific. This is what defines my projects and roots them to their context within the city at that time, or the group of people that might be developing that project at that time.

This involves a serious engagement, both directly with the communities I’m serving, and with the cultural, historical, and geographic specificities of the context. The starting point for me is always to gain an understanding of exactly these qualities – what I call the cultural DNA of a place – and to use them as the essential drivers for the form and the materiality of the building. But I want to reinterpret them through 21st-century mechanisms – to defamiliarize them and re-present them as something that is both recognizable but ultimately new.

Adjaye combined 1920s Russian architectural style with influences from his African heritage to design the Moscow School of Management, built in 2010. Photograph: Ed Reeve
Adjaye combined 1920s Russian architectural style with influences from his African heritage to design the Moscow School of Management, built in 2010. Photograph: Ed Reeve

You don’t have a signature look, but which materials and elements do you often return to?
I pay great attention to materials and my work is often distinguished by its eclectic palette. Materials can be one of the most emotive tools – I think people connect with them on a visceral level. It’s also important to me to integrate new or unexpected materials with more traditional ones. It is often the juxtaposition that offers a unique perspective on composition and materiality. I very much enjoy working with wood – my pavilions are good examples of this – and we are also exploring the use of bronze on the façade of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC – a historical reference to African American craftsmanship.

The Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. Photograph: Adjaye Associates
The Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. Photograph: Adjaye Associates

As well as buildings, you’ve turned your hand to furniture and textiles. How do these collaborations happen, and is it freeing to do something different?
Every project, no matter the scale, is an opportunity to express my position in terms of materials, silhouettes, and forms – in fact, an extension of my work as an architect. In the past five years I’ve increasingly been interested in smaller scale design because I appreciate the way the lead time allows me to test out new ideas with some immediacy. It’s a great contrast to my architectural work, which unfolds across many years. The collection I designed for design firm Knoll, for example, was very much an exploration of the “body in space” – but on a smaller scale than my architectural work. Knoll has always had an amazing ability to produce furniture that is a distillation of the zeitgeist of the age – it was this relationship between life, space, and objects that resonated with my own work. Finding specific conditions, amplifying them, and making them aesthetic while giving them the potential to be part of our world is what I am interested in.

The Washington collection, including the Washington Corona aluminum coffee table, was designed by David Adjaye for Knoll and transforms his architectural and sculptural vision into accessible objects for the home and office.
The Washington collection, including the Washington Corona aluminum coffee table, was designed by David Adjaye for Knoll and transforms his architectural and sculptural vision into accessible objects for the home and office.

Which projects are you most proud of?
It is very difficult to say. Every project feels like a career milestone. However, I must say that it is incredible to be approaching the opening of the National Museum of African American History and Culture in DC this September. I worked on this project for eight years, and so it has been incredibly personal. At the same time, I am humbled by its much longer history and the significance of the building to the African American community. It’s finally recognizing the contribution of the African American community to the definition of America.

Talk us through a few of your current projects?
We are lucky to be working on a diverse range of projects – so I’ll mention just a few. In the US, we’re designing a new home for the Studio Museum in Harlem, and we are working with the Linda Pace Foundation on a new gallery in San Antonio, and with the Four Seasons on the reinvention of the West Heating plant in Washington, DC. In London, we are working on a major redevelopment project in Piccadilly that is opposite the Ritz hotel. In Ghana, we are working on a masterplan – a school campus and residential projects. We are also creating a new headquarters building for the International Finance Group in Dakar, Senegal, and a residential tower in Johannesburg.

Adjaye’s vision for the lobby of Gahanga International Children’s Cancer Hospital, in Rwanda, East Africa.
Adjaye’s vision for the lobby of Gahanga International Children’s Cancer Hospital, in Rwanda, East Africa.

You were born in Africa and have worked there (as well as undertaking an extensive study of architecture there). What can you tell us about the current state of architecture in the continent?
African architecture over the last three decades has been predominantly about the development of modernity, with borrowed images from the West. There is now a new generation trying to establish the DNA of a contemporary African architecture, which is more responsive to the idea of place and embodies lessons from vernacular African architecture, combined with a contemporary sensibility.

There is now a new generation trying to establish the DNA of a contemporary African architecture, which is more responsive to the idea of place

You’re a champion of younger practitioners. How do you think architecture will evolve?
Cities are growing faster than ever. I think that how we interact with each other, how we tolerate each other, and how architecture mediates these sort of things, will become more important than just how well you can build structures and what sorts of techniques and tools you have at your disposal. I believe it will become increasingly crucial to deconstruct the idea that design can be universal and, instead, to think in terms of a regionally specific vernacular. An architecture that derives inspiration from ‘place’ will articulate a compelling sense of place and have a stronger social relevance.

How did you feel to receive your OBE?
It was a huge honor for me and I feel very grateful that my civic work in the UK has been recognized.

What are your unfulfilled ambitions?
I would love to design an airport at some point – I spend so much time in them that I have cultivated quite a few ideas of how to approach them!