One of the leading architects of his generation and a global cultural ambassador for the UK, London-based, Ghanaian-British architect Sir David Adjaye OBE believes in the power of architecture to achieve positive social change.
Q&A with Sir David Adjaye
Tell me about your background.
I was born in East Africa. My father was the first generation of diplomats from newly-formed countries, so he was a on a fast track to learn the business. We moved from country to country quite dramatically in the early days of my life: Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Lebanon and Yemen. I have memories of Beirut especially, how beautiful it was there – it made a strong impression on me. My family has no connection to the arts that I know of. It’s very much a lawyer, doctor, middle-class family, so when I was interested in the arts, I was very nervous that my father was not going to be happy, but he was incredibly encouraging and supported me to do what I believed I wanted to do. I didn’t even know what career I wanted to go into, but I knew that I was interested in the arts. He encouraged me to explore that, and from that, I discovered architecture, and that was really a gift for me.
Why did you decide to found your own company Adjaye & Russell in 1994, then Adjaye Associates in 2000?
It wasn’t really out of choice. There was a big recession at that time, in the ’90s, and I couldn’t get any work, so I had to start working on my own, but luckily I started to get small pieces of work, residential work mostly. I was working from home; my living room was my studio. And as I got more work, I asked my dear friend at the time, William Russell, to join me. I decided that I wanted to have a partnership, so we formed a company. It’s not always great to form businesses with friends. It just didn’t work out. I think our directions were both very different, so we went our separate ways. In 2000, I had enough work for me to realize that I had a practice. I had 12 people working for me and I set about charting my course as an individual architect in the world.
Describe the driving force and principles of your approach to architecture.
The guiding principle is a deep respect of culture, place and geography and to see architecture as an incredibly huge honor to be able to build. Each project is an opportunity to see if one can make sense of the human habitation and the culture developed over the years in that place in a specific way that marks the moment in a built form, and can be useful and flexible to future generations to come. Architecture is a social art and the social responsibility of that is incredibly important. It’s a contract with the public to be a steward or guardian of what it means to make public work, so that’s something that’s very serious to me.
What role does sustainability play in your work?
It’s so important. Architecture is the most wasteful art form on the planet. We are the most abusive form because we use the most and we use a lot of energy. We always encourage our clients to be resourceful and mindful to the sustainability of projects, both in terms of long life cycles as well as immediate. It’s about meaningfully embedding a project with real strategies that give best value back to the end user and create the lowest impact on the planet and its resources.
Tell me about the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington DC.
That was probably one of the most important projects of my career so far. It was making a museum a memorial and a monument, so by bringing these three disparate things together in one building, the narrative of the building becomes much more explicit. I think in all my work, the notion of narrative has always been there, but the museum forced me to be really very publicly explicit about the agenda of what I was trying to do, and to work on such a profound site as The Mall was an incredible privilege.
Explain to me the importance of the Sugar Hill development in New York City.
Sugar Hill was my first big project in New York. What was very powerful for me was to work with an organization committed to getting people off the streets. This is housing for the lowest income. I really wanted to work on it because, in a way, the New York story has always been about luxury and the rags-to-riches story, while this is about common decency and maintaining a safety net for communities. This is a kind of architecture of resistance. I was trying to put in place in that resistance many other associated systems to allow it to not just become a ghetto housing system, so there’s a children’s storytelling museum, a crèche, commercial space and spaces for the residents in it. It’s a multi-program building, which is trying to build resistance and to allow this kind of community to have dignity in the city.
Check back next week for Part 3 featuring the continuation of the Q&A with Sir David Adjaye.