How David Adjaye designs with diplomacy
PUBLISHED: 31 Oct 2014 04:16:00 | UPDATED: 31 Oct 2014 11:28:34
English architect David Adjaye's acclaimed international projects include the Nobel Peace Centre in Oslo, the Moscow School of Management and London's Stephen Lawrence Centre. Photo: Nic Walker
Architecture flourishes in proximity to a good client. Better still, a good client with money and influence. As British writer Deyan Sudjic observes in his 2005 book The Edifice Complex: "To work at all in any culture the architect has to establish a relationship with the rich and powerful. There is nobody else with the resources to build." Once you accept this interdependence of architecture and power, it follows that the architect is always, at some level, a diplomat – navigating the political, economic and social forces that allow architecture to be made.
One architect who understands the power of diplomacy more than most is David Adjaye, son of a Ghanian career diplomat and now one of the most sought after architects on the planet. Adjaye had an itinerant childhood moving from embassy to embassy, from Dar es Salaam to Nairobi, Jeddah to Accra. "There were many dinner parties where my dad was always giving speeches and I was always watching from under the table or up the stairs," says the 48-year-old Brit. "I saw him as this great communicator and wanted to be like him."
Little did his father know how those early days, and those social gatherings of Hindus, Muslims, Christians and Sikhs from all corners of the world, would foster in his young son an irrepressible hunger to communicate across cultures – not as an ambassador but as an architect who believes that good design can plant the seeds of positive change. "Architecture can express ideas that can fundamentally help people project into a potential future," he says. "Architecture is great at that. At its best it can be truly transformative."
Adjaye has already achieved more in two decades of work than many do in a lifetime. Since launching less than 14 years ago, his Adjaye Associates has designed a slew of libraries, museums, stylish residences and social housing projects, cultural institutes and public spaces in the likes of London, Gabon, Beirut and Doha. Adjaye received an OBE in 2007; in 2012 he was announced top of the UK power list of Britain's most influential black people; and in 2013 he was named architecture innovator of the year by The Wall Street Journal. To round off his over-achieving curriculum vitae, he lives between London and New York with his wife, former model turned business collaborator Ashley Shaw-Scott.
His greatest project, however, is yet to be completed. The National Museum of African American History and Culture is taking shape on the last available site on Washington Mall and is due to open in 2016. Part of the Smithsonian, it is adjacent to the Washington Monument and pitching distance from the White House. "I'm not on the President's speed dial," laughs Adjaye, who was in Australia to speak at the National Architecture Conference in May. "But yes, I've been invited to the White House a couple of times."
National Museum of African American History and Culture
Explorative training
If it weren't for the encouragement of Adjaye's childhood art teacher, Mr Jenkins, it could all have been so different. As a child Adjaye was tempted to follow in the footsteps of his older brother James, now director of the Institute for Stem Cell Research and Regenerative Medicine in Düsseldorf, Germany. "I followed my brother for a while, because I could see he was really good, and that meant I could be good," muses Adjaye. "Plus back then, the arts was something that nobody went into as a young kid of colour with an education. You were supposed to be a doctor or in medicine."
After years of roaming North Africa, Adjaye's family had put down roots in the UK. Adjaye and brothers James and Emmanuel suddenly had to adapt to the relative monoculture of North London. "As young kids it was very traumatic trying to assimilate, although we were at an age where in no time we became local North London kids," he says. "But always with this other African identity in the back of our heads, and for me it was something that never left me."
Encouraged by Mr Jenkins to take a more creative direction, Adjaye's days of not belonging were to pass upon enrolling for an arts course at Middlesex. "The minute I arrived it was like love at first sight. I was surrounded by lots of incredibly cosmopolitan people, and I realised I was not so different." After a year spent studying fine art, Adjaye decided to move into design. "I was a little freaked out by the artist's life. I wanted a career path." Narrowing his graduate options down to architecture, he decided he didn't want to go through conventional architecture education. "Most architecture schools didn't seem very creative," he says. "You were expected to study under one tutor and effectively follow his style. The Royal College of Art was different."
Renowned for cross-pollination between its various disciplines, the RCA was, in the early '90s, under the spell of the charismatic Theo Crosby, éminence grise of the British architecture world. "Under Crosby as professor of architecture and design, the RCA was very explorative," Adjaye says. "The architecture department was like an art school, so I got to mix a lot with artists and other creative disciplines."
A-list clients
Completing his studies precociously fast, Adjaye set up a small practice and commenced a fairly typical graduate roster of home extensions and renovations. Less typical was his initial client list: an A-list of emerging creatives including artists Jake Chapman and Chris Ofili, fashion designer Alexander McQueen and film star Ewan McGregor.
He may have opted for a more sensible career path than that of his artist friends, but with his fledgling East End office just a short stroll from the creative wellspring of Hoxton Square and Shoreditch, he was forever bumping into old college mates who had bought a disused factory or dilapidated house and needed help.
Inevitably this band of creative patrons spurred the young architect to stretch himself and the design brief far from the average "box out the back". The result was a series of modestly budgeted yet uncompromisingly sculptural homes. They not only pushed domestic convention to the limit but also London's infamously conservative planning regulations. Some within the profession wondered how he got away with it.
"I have to thank Crosby for that," Adjaye says. "He introduced us all at the RCA to post-modernism, which meant learning the classical language of architecture. At the time the post-modern obsession with classicism seemed a bit eccentric. We even had to do a short course in stone carving, which had us seriously concerned at being a laughing stock.
"But Crosby was just trying to get us prepared for the world that actually existed. Planning in the UK means understanding the different stages of the evolution of the classical language in Britain, from Palladian to Victoria. Compared to which the contemporary language of architecture is just not accepted as the norm. So Crosby forced us to speak to that classical discourse."
Whether in the UK or in Australia, most council planning regimes have a default setting – one that respects and up to a point understands the historical canon. This theory is borne out in Adjaye's Dirty House for British artists Tim Noble and Sue Webster. A dark, brooding and unflinchingly contemporary form, it also speaks, when looked at through planning eyes, a classical language of measured proportions, rhythmic geometry, neutral tones and material heft.
"Without a doubt this is how I got through that planning process, because I actually know the language London was built from," Adjaye says.
Where many architects would be happy to consolidate a portfolio of stylish residencies for artists, Hollywood stars and fashion gurus, Adjaye was already looking for the next thing. A series of small but conceptually engaging public buildings began to emerge, each in its own way bridging the gap between civic space and private development.
Chief among them was a new generation library that was part of a wider campaign by the London borough of Tower Hamlets to stem a decline in library visitors in the area, which had fallen to less than half the national average. Resources were to be consolidated around a fewer number of dynamic knowledge hubs rebranded as Idea Stores. Adjaye was brought in to advise, finally designing two. The resulting buildings welcome a new audience of tech savvy, digital natives more attuned to swiping and clicking than page turning.
Another strategic shift from the traditional library is the co-location of Idea Stores next to their conventional counterparts – shops. The flagship store in Whitechapel was given a hybrid public/private high street presence; part steel and glass corporate façade, part colourful, bustling and kid friendly. Idea meets IKEA, welcoming one and all, whatever culture, class or operating system.
Suddenly and spectacularly for an architect still in his 30s, doors opened for Adjaye overseas. A fax came from Norway asking if he'd participate in a competition to design the new Nobel Peace Centre in Oslo, which he won. A fax came from Denver asking him to participate in a design competition for a new library. He won that, too. Russia came knocking; shortly after he was designing the Moscow School of Management, a shimmering cluster of rectangular blocks atop a circular form that appears to float above the ground. To what extent this metaphors the Russian economy is a moot point.
A daunting job
Then along came the commission that even for this wunderkind was a daunting challenge. In April 2003 a site was confirmed on the Washington Mall for the new National Museum of African American History and Culture. As cultural edifices go there are few with a site or a program more loaded with historical resonance and political complexity.
Again, it started with a fax. Adjaye had been chosen as part of a long-list of the architecture world's great and good. This list was narrowed down to six and each was given $100,000 to develop a scheme. Adjaye had teamed up with respected architectural consultants Freelon Group and Davis Brody Bond. The two American practices had already completed the museum's programming study and although well established, lacked the star power of a Zaha Hadid or a Norman Foster.
That's where Adjaye stepped in, bringing his rising star cache along with an unusual blend of 21st century nous and a fluent understanding of architectural classicism. Here in the United States' epicentre of power, where Jefferson projected a newly emancipated nation as the rightful heir to classical civilisation, it turned out to be the winning combination.
"On first impressions the design doesn't look connected to Jefferson's classical vision, but it is," says Adjaye. "It's an alternative trajectory, which in fact takes its cues from right next door." Now well under construction, the museum is within 90 metres of the Washington Monument, an obelisk inspired by the Pharaonic forms of Karnak. "The museum conforms to the geometry of the obelisk, yet is entirely a Yoruba form created by those descendants of southern Egypt. So here on the Mall, dominated by one tradition of classicism that flourished north of the Nile basin, I wanted to celebrate the southern tradition."
Just as the Whitechapel Idea Store eschews the library as cultural citadel, Adjaye's Washington museum redefines the language of architectural power. "In all of my public buildings I try very hard to democratise the knowledge. I'm not interested in you having to understand a classical building before being able to use the building. I want the building to be immediately useful to you and connected to you. I want to take it off the plinth and put it back on the ground."
It's this underlying argument that marks Adjaye's work from that of many other global architects. Beyond the stroking of civic or corporate vanity with yet another architectural icon, he wants to engage a deeper social narrative. He believes in the power of architecture to catalyse change.
Sometimes this narrative runs close to hyperbole, not least because of a project turnover that spreads Adjaye pretty thin. What started as a modest practice has turned into a firm of nearly 100 architects working in four continents across dozens of projects simultaneously. This is perhaps why he recently established an independent team within the practice, largely composed of non-architects and led by his wife Shaw-Scott, who was fresh from the London School of Economics with a masters in gender, development and globalisation. This team doesn't design a thing but instead conducts extensive research on the places, cultures, climates, economies and politics of the many places around the world in which the practice works. Another profession might call it foreign intelligence.
Moscow School of Management
Ed Reeve
Speaking to latent forces
Not happy with the modern edict of form following function, which reduced much of late 20th century architecture to a uniform code, Adjaye aspires to a way of working that negotiates the problems and possibilities of a specific place. "The work is speaking to the latent forces within a culture that wants to emerge. A sense of democracy, accessibility, equality and inclusion." With these words he invokes a social and political campaign that sounds anachronistic in this architectural age, which largely abandons social aspirations for the quick fix of the hero image and the iconic statement.
This campaign, to engage people and to inspire change, may well meet its greatest challenge in the years ahead, with an investment in Africa that led in 2011 to the opening of an office in Accra, Ghana. Adjaye is no arriviste to the fascination some economists have for the growing economic power of MINT countries (Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria, and Turkey). While the world has only recently woken up to Africa's potential, Adjaye takes a longer view.
For more than 10 years he travelled to Africa whenever he had a break between projects, visiting and photographing every capital city, researching Africa's urban conditions and architectural language. The result was not only a major exhibition and seven-volume book but also a deep conviction that things were changing in Africa, not only due to foreign direct investment, but also because of a changing attitude within the African people. It's a change he wants to be part of.
"Africa has what I call the engines of potential growth. People leave Africa to study at Harvard or wherever, but increasingly they now return, to Gabon, Senegal, Mozambique. This emergent, educated middle class of trained professionals will change things. At the same time there are cracks in the Big Man syndrome of African politics. Some leaders are proving nimble networkers. They don't have the infrastructure, but they know how to bring the resources to that challenge and they are not frightened to do so."
Neither is Adjaye. While many architects retain large head offices, setting up skeleton branch offices to run projects overseas, he has reversed the model, keeping the London office small and investing resources where it is needed, in America, Europe and increasingly in Africa. Within a short time his Accra office has built an impressive portfolio of residential, educational and resort projects in Ghana and beyond. But what of the downside of rapid urban transformation in emerging economies? Will Africa not go the way of China with its pollution, shoddy construction and razed heritage?
"You know, I think Africa will have a fair share of that," says Adjaye. "But of course most architecture exists in a sea of horror. At its best it can carry a certain radiance that blinds you to the crap that's around. We'll never achieve an architectural utopia of beautiful buildings, but what we can do is create an image that overrides the rest."
For Adjaye a worse horror than unregulated and poorly planned urban growth is that architecture loses its radiance, becoming nothing more than the product of commercial and political expedience. "Then we have nothing more than the machine of development," he says. "We know we can build big, fast, high. That is not the problem any more. The question is what does all this stuff that we are involved in represent? And in fact, do we, as architects, even have a meaningful contribution to make to this discussion any more?"
It's a point that could be made in Africa, in America or in Australia. Somewhere between the increasingly obscure internalised world of architectural theory and the high-octane superficial world of architectural celebrity there is a growing sense that something profound has been lost or sacrificed. For Adjaye it is unequivocally architecture's social purpose: a position for which some within the architectural establishment have criticised him.
"I was teaching in America and a highly respected architectural theorist said, 'I hate architecture that takes any responsibility for society.' Yet that is precisely why that generation of architects and intellectuals failed. That attitude of navel gazing has effectively given away our agency to the project managers." More than anything this sums up Adjaye's creative, cultural and political mission. To get it back.
Andrew Mackenzie is director of architectural consultancy City Lab.
Funmi Tofowomo Okelola
-In the absence of greatness, mediocrity thrives.
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