The National Museum of African American History and Culture, on the Mall in Washington, D.C., is a little more than two years away from its scheduled opening. When I visited the site in June with David Adjaye, the Ghanaian-British architect who won an international competition in 2009 to design the building, it was a five-acre hole in the ground. Construction din made conversation impossible, so Adjaye asked the foreman to drive us to the other end, where we sat under a tree on a grassy bank. Behind us was the Washington Monument, shrouded in scaffolding for repairs and maintenance. Adjaye is forty-six, young for a profession that favors age and experience, and he projects a youthful and frequently joyous self-confidence. Just over six feet tall, with a clean-shaved head and an elegant fringe of mustache that continues downward to frame his chin line, he was casually but impeccably dressed in narrow-cut black pants and an open-necked blue-and-white checked shirt, with a stylish windbreaker slung over one shoulder. The museum, which is being built on the last unoccupied site in the centerpiece of Pierre Charles L’Enfant’s 1791 master plan for the capital, is by far his most important commission. Adjaye said, “I try not to think about that too much. If I do, I’m paralyzed. Look around on the Mall, and you have a narrative about the history of architecture, from Karnak to the Renaissance to the neoclassical style in America. I just have to concentrate on what’s the best building I can make for this museum.”
The one he designed is a modernist structure infused with African motifs. It’s essentially a steel-and-glass box within an outer skin, or cladding, of openwork aluminum panels coated with bronze. A single, three-by-five-foot panel, a sample for the public to see, was mounted on a pole near the perimeter fence, close to an artist’s painted rendering of the finished museum. “There will be about thirty-six hundred panels,” Adjaye explained. “The design was something we adapted, through many prototypes, from the ornamental metal castings that were done by slaves and former slaves in Charleston and New Orleans before and after the Civil War—using techniques that had been developed much earlier in Benin and other African cultures. In some panels, the pattern is denser than in others. I want the light to be articulated, so the east side of the building has one kind of light and the south side has another—a continuous dappling light.”
Bronze darkens with age. On the Mall, where white Tennessee marble is the norm, Adjaye’s museum will present a striking contrast. He has had to fight many battles over the panels, which will cost several million dollars to make and install, but Lonnie Bunch III, the museum’s director, a sixty-year-old African-American who grew up in New Jersey, told me that the battle was now largely won. Bunch has spent most of his professional career working for the Smithsonian Institution, which oversees this museum and twenty-two other museums and cultural institutions in the capital, and he knows a lot about dealing with Congress and with the various committees and agencies that wield great power—advisory or actual—over what gets built on the Mall. He was the chairman of the Smithsonian committee that chose the Adjaye team, from a short list of candidates that included Foster + Partners, Pei Cobb Freed & Partners, and Diller Scofidio + Renfro, to design the museum. (Adjaye’s design partners on the project were Philip Freelon—who is actually the architect of record—from North Carolina, and J. Max Bond, Jr., the much loved dean of African-American architects, who died of cancer shortly before the competition was decided.) Bunch said, “In one of our early conversations, before I made the final decision, David talked a lot about not being an American, but having an African root, and recognizing how important this story was for everyone. He had really immersed himself in African-American history. He could see this project for what I wanted it to be, which was not just a museum for black people but a museum to help people of one culture understand the experience of people of a different culture.”
The idea had been around for a very long time. In 1915, a group of black citizens who had fought in the Union Army during the Civil War gathered in Washington and drew up a proposal for a memorial that would recognize the achievements of black people in this country. Nothing came of it, and, time after time in the ensuing decades, when legislation was introduced in Congress to reinstate the project, it was quashed or tabled. In the nineteen-sixties, spurred by the civil-rights movement, local museums of African-American history sprang up in cities and towns across the country—about a hundred of them exist today—but the real push for a national center had to wait until 1987, when John Lewis, the former leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and now a Democratic congressman from Georgia, began agitating for it in the House. Lewis’s efforts died in the Senate, because of Jesse Helms’s implacable opposition; when he tried again in 2003, however, Republican senators Sam Brownback and Rick Santorum joined their Democratic colleagues and passed the National Museum of African American History and Culture Act, and President George W. Bush signed it. By 2008, when the design competition for the museum building was announced, questions about cost, funding, and location had all been decided. The museum would cost five hundred million dollars, with Congress appropriating half the amount and the Smithsonian raising the rest from private sources, and it would be built on the Mall (where slaves were once auctioned). Adjaye has made changes in an effort to stay within the budget, cutting back on floor space and ceiling height in a few places, and downgrading some of the interior finishes. “In public projects you never get everything you want,” he said. But so far, at least, the original design has not been compromised. To date, the project has received a little more than three hundred million dollars from government and private sources (Oprah Winfrey recently gave twelve million), and Bunch is confident that the rest will come in on time.
What happens inside the museum is up to Bunch and the museum’s curatorial staff. They have already acquired more than twenty thousand objects and artifacts. The list includes the dress that Rosa Parks was making for herself on the day she refused to give up her seat on a bus; Nat Turner’s Bible and Louis Armstrong’s trumpet; a drinking fountain for “colored” only; a log cabin built by freed slaves in Maryland, soon after emancipation; a Stearman biplane used to train the Tuskegee Airmen, an all-black unit of pilots in the Second World War; and the handcuffs used by the police officer who arrested the Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., in 2009. Adjaye has thought deeply about what this museum could represent. For the two-hundred-foot-long entrance hall, he designed a ceiling that he describes as “a shower of timber,” an inverted bowl made from thousands of lengths of split pine—symbolizing the vast numbers of Africans who were brought to this country as slaves. “It’s a monument without explicitly being a monument,” he said. The current building boom in Washington has driven construction costs higher and higher, and the estimate for the ceiling alone now exceeds two million dollars. This will put a severe strain on the budget, and Bunch is currently considering less expensive alternatives. Adjaye is not happy about this. The two fundamental pillars of his design are the bronze-panel exterior and the convex wood ceiling of the entrance hall, which will combine, he believes, to create a uniform emotional experience—something akin to what the Guggenheim Museum’s soaring spiral achieves. “I wanted to create this feeling of weight bearing down on you at the entrance, a powerful impression of timber, like a great forest. In the way that cathedrals used vaults and arches to make people feel the immensity of the space, I’m trying for something with a different effect—I want the architecture to make you feel the weight of an enormous body of history, which you will then go in and explore. I can be shut down on this—accused of being decadent, because it costs so much. The jury is still out.”
Adjaye had been talking more and more rapidly. He can be hyper-articulate and unpretentious at the same time—passion without ego. “I think museums are very different now from what they were even twenty years ago,” he said. “The Pompidou Center showed what had to happen, in terms of new curatorial approaches and flexible space. This idea of a museum of experiences and knowledge, and of access and information, is what’s being presented here.” Adjaye’s only other museum to date is the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver, which opened in 2004; it was his first public commission in this country, and his goal was to make it feel as close as possible to the experience of being in an artist’s studio. His new museum is about history, a very dark history that moves toward redemption. “What astonished me when I first started researching,” he said, “was that, of the eleven million people taken out of Africa in the slave trade, less than half a million came here. The others went to the Caribbean and to South America—Brazil, mainly. North America is the very end of the slave trade, but the story here is much bigger. It continues through the Civil War, the migrations to the urban centers, the civil-rights movement, and the cultural changes that happened with music and literature, right on through to Obama now. It’s a four-hundred-year history which looks at the American experience through the lens of the African-American.”
He was quiet for a minute, and then he said, “I think a museum devoted to history is quite a new thing. The Holocaust Museum is about a period, not a history. And, of course, this museum is not just about slavery. It’s about who we are and where we came from, which is a more interesting conversation.” He modelled the museum’s silhouette, he said, on the columns of Yoruba shrines. “What was the architecture of Africa at the time that Africans were being taken to America? The biggest empire at that time was that of the Yoruba, in Nigeria and Benin. Historically, they were the best casters, the best artisans; they made incredible sculptures out of terra-cotta and bronze, and also beautiful shrine structures. The shrine architecture had carved timber columns, and the three-tiered form at the top was probably the most familiar architectural motif of the fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth centuries. So I said, Why don’t we start with that?” From a distance, Adjaye’s building resembles three stacked, upside-down pyramids, and its external cladding repeats the same notched form. He pulled out an iPad and located a full-scale mockup of a section of the bronze panels. When he enlarged it, I could see that they were set at slight, zigzag angles to the horizontal. “You see,” he said, laughing delightedly, “I’m inventing an image of a classical idea for African America, a kind of root for the future.”
Adjaye’s parents came from small villages in Ghana. When Kwame Nkrumah won the country’s independence from Great Britain, in 1957, Adjaye’s father, Affram, who had managed to get an education, took the civil-service exam and went to work for the postal department. After several promotions, he switched to the foreign office, and was posted to the Ghanaian Embassy in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, where David was born in 1966. Both Affram and Cecelia, his wife, had children from previous marriages, and they had two more after David—Peter and Emmanuel. Every so often, they moved to a different country. By the time David was eleven, he had lived in Dar es Salaam, Kampala, Nairobi, Cairo, Beirut, Accra, and Jeddah. In each country, he went to a private international school, where English was the lingua franca, and he became adept at getting along with children of different cultures and religions. While Affram was stationed in Accra, Ghana’s capital, five-year-old Emmanuel developed a high fever. In the hospital, he fell into a weeklong coma, and when he came out of it one side of his body was paralyzed. “This changed everything,” Adjaye recalls. “Our mother devoted her life to caring for him, and our father decided that, instead of pursuing his career, he would go where Emmanuel could get the best care.” After two years in Saudi Arabia, as first secretary of the Embassy, Affram took a position at the Ghanaian Embassy in London, and the Adjaye family, which included two of Cecelia’s children by her first marriage, moved to England and settled in the northwest London suburb of Hampstead.
After the cosmopolitan mix of nationalities at the schools he’d attended, the smug insularity of the British students amazed Adjaye. He went to a state school, where he heard racist taunts for the first time. “The English kids thought their world was so superior,” he recalls. “I couldn’t understand it, because to me they were more like village kids.” David and Peter did well in school. Peter was quicker to assimilate—soon after they arrived he stopped speaking Twi, a Ghanaian dialect that the family used (and still uses) at home, but David held on to it. David spent much of his free time drawing—he imagined and drew fantastic, intricate worlds in comic-book formats. In his late teens, he had a rebellious period, hanging out with a rough crowd and ignoring his parents’ efforts to establish curfews and rein him in. He stayed very close to his family, though, and the rebellious streak ended abruptly, toward the end of his last year in high school, when he saw a boy stabbed to death on the street. “In Saudi Arabia, I had seen some terrible things,” he said. “I remember the public execution of a princess who was accused of adultery, but this was different, the first encounter with death in my world.” Soon afterward, his high-school art teacher, who had encouraged his gift for drawing, arranged for him to enroll in the foundation-art course at Middlesex University, which was near his family’s home in North London.
He completed the one-year foundation course, and then, instead of continuing on at Middlesex, he dropped out to work on an architectural commission. Two of his wealthier classmates had asked him and another student to design a café for them in Hampstead. They took the job for no fee, and built it themselves, using cheap materials and inventing ways to make them look distinctive. The café got noticed and other job offers came in, and Adjaye went to work for the London firm headed by Tchaik Chassay. He stayed for three years and worked on all sorts of buildings, from commercial offices to private houses. In 1989, he decided to go back to school. He shopped his portfolio around to several architectural schools, and chose London South Bank University, because it agreed to let him skip the first two years. He sailed through his third-year courses, took an architectural degree with first-class honors, and won the medal for the best project of the year in a British design school—a home for the disabled.
His brother Emmanuel, who was unable to talk or to move on his own, attended a special day school for the disabled, and David had been appalled by how inefficient and degrading it was. At South Bank, he began to think about designing a facility that could provide better care for the handicapped, and greater dignity. “I was interested in what architecture could do, rather than in how beautiful it was,” he told me. “That’s what really started everything. I loved art, all kinds of art, but I couldn’t see how I could do that, after the education my parents had given me. They said the best thing we’re going to give you is an education, and we were supposed to take that out into the world. It seemed to me that architecture used many of the components of art, but it was a profession, and so I thought, O.K., perfect.”
Before going on to graduate school, he spent a few months in the office of David Chipperfield, a young British architect who was becoming known for rigorously modernist museums and cultural centers in England and Europe. He left to go with his girlfriend to Portugal, so that he could work with Eduardo Souto de Moura. Portugal had not been fully integrated into the European Union then, and the residential and civic architecture of Souto de Moura and Álvaro Siza was less standardized, with regard to methods and materials, than anything being done in Europe. “It was all about working with craftsmen and artisans,” Adjaye said. “They designed the windows, the door handles, everything. Eduardo took me under his wing, and helped me to understand the creative drive of architecture.” He stayed for nearly a year, before returning to London to get a master’s degree at the Royal College of Art. A large part of his time there, from 1991 to 1993, was devoted to experiencing architecture in other places. Nearly every weekend, he and his friends would get on a plane and go somewhere—France, Italy, Greece, Scandinavia, the Middle East—to study and draw the monuments of antiquity and modernism, from the Parthenon to the Villa Savoye. On his own but with the school’s blessing, he spent nearly a year in Japan. “I wanted to see the gardens in Kyoto, and to experience the new Japanese architecture,” he said. “The work of Kenzo Tange, Toyo Ito, Tadao Ando, and Yoshio Taniguchi was being talked about in Europe. They used the generic language of modernism, and shifted it toward their own traditions. One of the things they did was find new uses for concrete. Concrete had been a rough, brutal material for Le Corbusier and others, and along came Ando and made it smooth as silk, a new marble.” Adjaye studied the imperial villa in Katsura, which was considered the essence of traditional Japanese design, and took classes on the history of Japanese Buddhism. He didn’t speak Japanese, but the professor summarized the material for him after class, in English. “I strung out my time there as long as possible,” he said. He had gone to the Royal College of Art because it was less restrictive than the purely architectural schools. “I didn’t want a trade,” he said. “I wanted an education.”
He graduated in 1993. The recession had largely shut down new construction in London, and jobs were scarce, but he was offered a teaching position at South Bank, his old college, and he took small jobs on the side. Music had always been a big part of his and Peter’s lives. They were both active in the d.j. scene in North London in the nineteen-eighties, and by the time Peter was twenty-one he had his own band and a record deal; he is now an experimental-music composer, who also directs a media center in London. Several of Adjaye’s early clients were in the music business. He designed sets for a music video by the Pretenders, and a wine cellar for David Gilmour, Pink Floyd’s lead guitar player. Word of mouth brought other jobs—cafés, a noodle house in Soho, a house for Alexander McQueen that was never built, because McQueen decided to sell the property. Adjaye had taken on a partner, a former Royal College classmate named William Russell. They worked out of Russell’s unused garage in Notting Hill, until Adjaye discovered that many artists were moving to the East End. “East London was full of nineteenth-century factories and workers’ housing,” he said. “It had been heavily bombed in the war. Not much reconstruction had been done, and the area was still a bit dangerous, with skinheads and large, empty warehouses.” They rented a small, very cheap space off Hoxton Square. One morning in 1997, walking by the Indian restaurants on Brick Lane, Adjaye spied a lime-green Ford Capri whose driver he recognized—it was Chris Ofili, whom he had known slightly as an art student at the Royal College. Ofili, who would win the Turner Prize a year later, was just starting to gain serious recognition. “What are you doing here?” they asked each other. Ofili explained that his London dealer, Victoria Miro, had found three abandoned houses on Fashion Street, a few blocks away, and that he and the Chapman brothers, Jake and Dinos, had each bought one at rock-bottom prices, to renovate and live in. As Ofili recalls the meeting, Adjaye said, “I’ve got an architecture office, my own firm, up the road, and I have to do your house.” (Adjaye remembers Ofili saying, “You’ve got to come and help me do this house.”) The result was an intense, two-year collaboration, young artist and young architect working together and learning from each other on the job, and a lifelong friendship.
“We didn’t even discuss the budget,” Adjaye said. “He wanted two things, a home and a studio, and they had to be completely separate.” They decided to put the studio on the ground floor, and scrounged the money to excavate so that the ceiling could be double-height. Ofili remembers thinking, “What if I don’t get more money, and all I’ve got is the hole?” The house, which was finished in 1999, gave him what he wanted: a studio with natural light, and spare, beautifully articulated rooms on the upper floors for living. (“I like rooms,” he told me, “not spaces.”) Several years later, when Ofili was married and had children, Adjaye remodelled the house as a family home, and designed a studio for him elsewhere. After 2000, Ofili began spending most of the year in Trinidad, and Adjaye built or remodelled his houses and studios there as well—a beach house and a new family home outside Port-of-Spain are nearing completion. “I got the bug,” Ofili confided. “Outside of painting, it’s my main indulgence, making buildings.” I asked him if he still had his lime-green Capri. “No,” he said, with a slight smile. “I had it crushed. I couldn’t bear seeing anyone else driving it.”
Adjaye also worked closely with Ofili on the installation of his cathedral-like exhibition of paintings at the 2003 Venice Biennale, and on “The Upper Room,” his 2002 show at Victoria Miro, in which thirteen large paintings of a rhesus macaque were presented in a darkened, dramatically lit environment with walnut panelling, which gave the space a pungent odor. “Chris wanted to de-commodify painting, to slow the viewer down and make it an experience,” Adjaye said. “That’s what I try to do now, it’s one of my tricks, but it was really perfected with Chris.” The Tate Gallery’s director, Nicholas Serota, came to see “The Upper Room” at Victoria Miro and eventually bought the installation. “Before I saw anything, I smelled it,” Serota recalled. “It was like going inside a cigar box. I think the strength of David’s architecture is that it’s never neutral. You know you’re in a definitely formed and crafted space, and the space is a part of the experience.”
Adjaye has continued to work with artists. His next house was for an artist couple, Giorgio Sadotti and Elizabeth Wright. He had parted company with Russell, and, in 2000, formed his own company, Adjaye Associates. (For several years, he was the sole employee; now his London office employs thirty-five associates, but no partners—Adjaye runs the show.) The new house, built on the ruins of a shoe factory in Whitechapel, nearly derailed his career. “Because the site was in a conservation area, the house had to have a certain amount of glass on the outside,” Adjaye explained. “I designed a glass façade, but when we were building it the couple ran out of money. I had already donated my fees to the project, so we were in a quandary. I said, Let’s clad the façade in the simplest, cheapest weatherproof material we can find, and that was plywood. I wasn’t thinking about codes.”
From the street, Elektra House, named for the couple’s eldest daughter, is dark, windowless, and doorless. (The door is around the corner, off an alley.) The unbroken façade of plywood sheets has a lustrous, metallic sheen—from the water-resistant, rust-colored resin he used—and its effect, on a street of nondescript red brick houses, is both stunning and mysterious. Inside, light pours down in the front room from a gap between the ceiling and a raised, overhanging roof, and the rest of the house is flooded with light from a glass wall in back, which overlooks a pretty walled garden. “It was startling to a lot of people,” Adjaye concedes. “It was on the cover of a major journal, and I thought, Oh, my God, I’m getting too famous.” The local council informed him that the house did not comply with the building code, and would have to be removed. Adjaye appealed the ruling, his appeal was rejected, and he was summoned to appear in court. Seriously worried that he might lose his license, or even go to jail, he went to see Richard Rogers, whose bold, high-tech architecture had made him one of England’s most admired and controversial cultural figures. After looking at Adjaye’s design plans, Rogers wrote a letter to the head of the council. It read, in part, “David Adjaye is one of the best architects of his generation in Britain, and this house reflects his great ability. I have absolutely no doubt that this house will be seen, in due course, as an example of its age.”
The charges were dropped, and the newly appointed head of the council asked Adjaye to come and see him. He told Adjaye that he was managing a program to build or renovate local libraries throughout London, and that he and other council members were conducting a national competition to choose the architects. “He arranged for me to enter the final stage of the competition,” Adjaye said. “I worked like crazy. I brought all the experience I’d had in Japan into it, and made something that was transparent, with open systems, and I won.” Elektra House (where the original owners still live) and the two libraries he built in London established Adjaye’s international presence. Okwui Enwezor, the director of the Haus der Kunst, in Munich, is showing a full-scale replica of Elektra House next fall, as part of a retrospective exhibition of Adjaye’s work that he has co-organized with the Art Institute of Chicago, where it will appear in 2015. “The house is like a sculpture,” he told me. “David may not think of himself as an artist, but he works like an artist.”
When I was in London this summer, Adjaye took me to see the larger of his two libraries, or Idea Stores, in London’s East End. This one is in Whitechapel. It’s an exuberant five-story building whose green-and-white glass façade echoes the striped green-and-white awnings above the multinational market stalls on the wide sidewalk in front. Between the glass façade and the interior, an escalator runs diagonally from the street to the top floor. It wasn’t running that day, but Judith St John, the Idea Store’s director, told us that people come to ride it just for the views. Adjaye said that the escalator had been inspired by Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano’s Pompidou Center, in Paris; he has used the same device in many of his later buildings, placing stairways adjacent to the front wall, where they don’t take up interior space. “We get seven hundred thousand visits a year,” St John said. “We’re open seven days a week.” Each of the five floors was teeming with people of all ages. There was an international café, and rooms for lectures, performances, and meetings, but there were also plenty of nooks and corners where people were reading or using their laptops. The Idea Store, Adjaye has said, is “a new type of institution, but one which has the accessibility of a shop.”
There is no clearly defined Adjaye style, no signature or formula. His public buildings are open and welcoming, filled with bright colors and daylight, which he “harvests”—Adjaye’s word—from unexpected sources; his private houses turn away from the urban world, shutting it out to provide serene and uncluttered retreats, like Elektra House. (Adjaye himself lives in a surprisingly bourgeois—“bougie,” he calls it—apartment in Whitehall, overlooking the Thames, which he renovated without eradicating its Edwardian elegance.) What runs through all his work is a sculptural use of materials—quite often inexpensive products like chipboard and plywood, which he transforms, through finishes and exquisite craftsmanship, into something rich and strange. The Dirty House, built for the artists Sue Webster and Tim Noble, in Shoreditch, confronts the street with mirror-glass windows and a rough-textured layer of bitumen paint, the kind that is applied to lampposts to make them graffitiproof. It looks black, but Webster, a quick-witted sculptor, whose husband, Tim, was at the Royal College at the same time as Adjaye, assured me that it is “very, very dark brown, the color of David’s skin.” (Adjaye says it’s really aubergine.) Webster blames Adjaye for making Shoreditch trendy. She pointed out several nearby buildings that have been painted black, including the upmarket Shoreditch House across the street.
Very few of Adjaye’s London projects could be called high-end. He has done some moderately expensive houses for people who interest him, but, with the exception of the Nobel Peace Center, in Oslo, which was commissioned in 2002 and opened in 2005, most of his public buildings benefit minority groups in non-affluent neighborhoods. The Bernie Grant Arts Centre, named for one of the first black politicians elected to Parliament, in 1987, is a teaching and performing-arts complex in Tottenham. The Stephen Lawrence Centre, which has a Chris Ofili abstract design embedded in its floor-to-ceiling glass façade, offers supplementary classes for high-school students in a tough neighborhood in South London—Stephen Lawrence, an eighteen-year-old black youth, was murdered by a gang of white racists in 1993. Although Adjaye’s practice has not made him rich, his prolific originality gained rapid recognition, and this led to a backlash in some sectors. “You’re not supposed to see the rocket rising; you’re just supposed to hear that it’s arrived,” as Chris Ofili said. Janet Street-Porter, a well-known journalist and television commentator, attacked Adjaye in a 2005 article in the Independent. Angry over leaks and other defects in the house she had commissioned him to build, she called him a fashionable architect but a bad one, “someone I dream of regularly ritually disemboweling . . . before mopping up the storm water in my living room with his designer sweaters.” Adjaye was stunned by her venom. He had half a dozen international projects nearing completion, and many more in the works, but there were doubters who resented his growing fame. They were rewarded in 2007, the year he won the Order of the British Empire for his public-sector work, when the financial recession shut down credit worldwide and all his projects in the public sector were cancelled. “Suddenly I was free-falling,” he said. “In 2007, I had nothing.”
He was forced to restructure Adjaye Associates, but he rode out the crisis. “People who don’t understand David’s force of character thought he was finished,” Okwui Enwezor told me. “There was no weakness at all, and no bitterness toward his detractors. He just stuck to who he was.” In 2008, Adjaye won the competition for a huge urban project in Doha, Qatar, eight blocks of apartment buildings, offices, and stores, which helped to stabilize his financial position. (The project is ongoing, and will take five or six more years to complete.) He secured a contract for the largest building he had yet done, a two-hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar school of business and management in Moscow (of all places), which was completed, on time and under budget, in 2010. Ginnie Cooper, who oversees libraries in Washington, D.C., had seen and admired the Idea Stores in London, and in 2008 she invited Adjaye to enter a competition to restore libraries in the capital; he was chosen to rebuild two of them. The commission to design the National Museum of African American History and Culture came a year later. By then, he had offices in London, Berlin, and New York, and projects pending or in progress on four continents.
Sugar Hill, in Harlem, is on the National Register of Historic Places. Duke Ellington, Thurgood Marshall, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Willie Mays all lived there, and in 2010 there were angry letters over David Adjaye’s plan for a low-income housing project in the heart of the neighborhood, on the corner of 155th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue. According to Ellen Baxter, who brokered the project, and who has worked for thirty years to create housing for low-income and homeless people in West Harlem and Washington Heights, some residents didn’t want a modern building, and they didn’t like the one Adjaye designed. In situations of this kind, Adjaye’s personality—warm and engaging, diplomatic, highly articulate but without a hint of professional swagger—can be very persuasive. “David was remarkably patient,” Baxter told me. “We received proposals from twenty-seven firms, and our design committee decided unanimously that David’s was by far the best.”
The thirteen-story building, which will accommodate a hundred and twenty-four apartments and has substantial city funding, will be completed next spring. Its slate-gray cast-concrete exterior is striated in a seemingly random pattern that resolves, when the light hits from an angle, into images of roses—the same images can be seen on cornices and above the front doors of neighboring brownstones, Adjaye pointed out to me when I visited the site with him. He said, “Context is so important, not to mimic but to become part of the place. I wanted a building that acknowledges its surroundings.” We rode the construction elevator to the roof. Sugar Hill is high ground, and the views are breathtaking—south to the Statue of Liberty, east to Yankee Stadium, north and west to the Hudson River and the George Washington Bridge. “Every apartment has a great view,” he said. The apartments range from studios to three bedrooms. About twenty per cent of them are being reserved for homeless people, and rents on the others will be adjusted for families with low or very low incomes. There is an early-childhood learning center on the ground floor, which connects with the public Sugar Hill Children’s Museum of Art & Storytelling. Adjaye has also provided a green roof, where tenants may be able to grow their own vegetables and plants. “I love this building so much,” he said. “This is why I do architecture. I’m just beginning to realize that what I build can influence the way people behave in these spaces.” As we were leaving, he pointed out how particles of quartz, embedded in the gray concrete, made it sparkle.
His fee for the Sugar Hill project barely covers his expenses, but what he’s learned from the job, he says, will nourish his future work. Adjaye believes that, in moving away from Renaissance notions of the ideal, too many contemporary architects have turned the profession into spectacle and entertainment. He said, “In the last few decades, architecture has become so starstruck that we think it’s about glamour and money, but it’s not. For me, architecture is a social act. It gives you a fantastic professional life, but it’s not a business you should go into to make money.” Some of his projects do make money. Adjaye’s design for turning the site of a former heating plant in Georgetown into a Four Seasons Residences will, if it wins approval from neighborhood, city, and federal agencies, provide the most expensive apartments in the capital, and he recently won a competition to build a one-million-square-foot office tower (his first) in Shanghai. Winning the commission for the Museum of African American History and Culture, moreover, has raised his profile considerably: Adjaye and his fiancée, a California-born business consultant and former model named Ashley Shaw-Scott, were seated at the Obamas’ table last winter at a White House state dinner for David Cameron. He doesn’t always win the important competitions, though, and when he loses a big one, as he did for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s expansion, or, more recently, for the Duke Ellington School of the Arts, in Washington, D.C., he takes it hard. Some of his friends wonder whether he drives himself too relentlessly. He has more than twenty projects in the works right now, and his first venture into industrial design, a collection for Knoll Associates that includes a molded-nylon side chair, which will come in seven colors and retail for three hundred dollars, goes on sale this fall. “There’s a center to David that I don’t think I’ll ever know,” one of Adjaye’s colleagues told me. “He enters all these competitions, which of course he wants to win, so he’s on the hook to please. I wish he could release himself from that.”
A significant part of Adjaye’s work now is in Africa. Twelve years ago, he went to visit a girlfriend who had been sent to Zambia by the U.N. That led to many subsequent trips on his own. He went whenever he could find the time, going to different countries, staying in the capital city and taking pictures of its buildings—everything from colonial statehouses to slums. When he showed the pictures to friends in Europe and the United States, he said, they were often surprised, “because they had no visual language for Africa; to them, it was jungles and mud huts.” During the next decade, he visited every one of the fifty-four post-colonial African countries. In 2010, the Design Museum in London showed a selection of his photographs, and Thames and Hudson published a boxed edition called “Adjaye Africa Architecture.” “I was seeing the decline of the world I was born into, and the beginnings of a new world,” he explained to me. “Countries with weak governments, like the Congo, were undergoing a new form of extraction colonialism, with wealth being taken out and nothing being done for local inhabitants, but many progressive countries have broken that pattern. Gabon, Sierra Leone, Ghana, Mozambique, Angola—they’re all trying to learn how to use the wealth to create a middle class.”
He is disturbed by the fact that so few major architects work in Africa. “They’ve built a lot of concrete-and-steel boxes there, because that’s what modernism is supposed to look like, but it’s such a backward image,” he said. “In the nineteen-seventies, many African cities cut down their trees to get wide boulevards and make them look modern, and then they had to build in vast quantities of air-conditioning. But tropical cities should be densely planted. You can moderate a climate very easily by shade, and it’s extraordinary how fast things grow in Africa. If you go into any village, there’s planting everywhere. They’ve been doing this for thousands of years—you just use technology to make it contemporary. Urban farming is critical—every flat roof should have a farm. More than half the planet now lives in cities, and we have to move away from thinking that farming is only done in the landscape.” What Adjaye fears is that city planners will indiscriminately impose standardized forms and models on African countries. “That’s why I opened an office in Accra, because I want to be in a position where I can make these models. I want an architecture that will only be good in Africa.”
He is currently working in Senegal, Nigeria, Gabon, and Ghana. The World Bank has just engaged him to design a headquarters in Dakar for the International Finance Corporation, or I.F.C., its private-sector arm, and in Libreville, Gabon’s capital, President Ali Bongo Ondimba has commissioned him to create the master plan for a new government complex on a central mall. Adjaye said, “Gabon is becoming very wealthy—gas and oil, mainly—and the President wants to transform it into a model country.” Ondimba’s wife saw Adjaye’s book of African photographs, invited him to design a building for her women’s-empowerment foundation (the groundbreaking is scheduled for next spring), and introduced him to the President, who has made him, in a sense, Libreville’s L’Enfant. He is also designing a museum of Bantu culture in Libreville and a plan for a new town on the seacoast, where the oil boom is centered.
Ghana has been a functioning democracy for more than thirty years. Two years ago, Adjaye built a house there for Kofi Annan, the former Secretary-General of the U.N. “He sent me an e-mail in London, saying, ‘I am Kofi Annan, and I would like to meet you.’ I thought, Oh, my God, Kofi Annan! He’s one of my heroes, and he comes from my parents’ region of Ghana.” Adjaye built him a house on the beach near Accra, made of concrete mixed with the red earth of his birthplace. He is also working with the Ghanaian cultural ministry to establish a historical museum near two of the country’s “slave castles.” A number of these fortress prisons were built by Europeans on Africa’s west coast, and, according to Adjaye, the memory of what happened there has largely been suppressed. “Slave catchers would go out to the villages and bring the people back, chained, to these castles, where they would be kept for a period to check for disease or weakness, before they were loaded onto the ships. They were crowded together in conditions that you have to see to believe—and the slave traders and their families lived on the floor above.” Brought in to advise on restoring one of the ruined castles, Adjaye told the ministry not to restore it but to stabilize and preserve the ruins. He said the architecture should give a clear picture of what happened there: “This is where the slaves were kept, this is where the residents lived, this is the chapel the residents prayed in, above the slave dungeons. It is unacceptable to lose this part of history, this gold rush of human bodies. I went with Lonnie Bunch to Ghana, and he basically agreed that it would be the perfect bookend to the Museum of African American History and Culture, because it gives you the beginning of the story.”
For the past decade or so, Adjaye estimates, he has spent about a third of his life on airplanes. Thelma Golden, the director of the Studio Museum in Harlem and one of Adjaye’s mentors in this country, has said that whenever she e-mails him she asks, “Where are you?” His wallet is stuffed with four currencies, his watch shows the hour in three time zones. He makes do with four hours’ sleep a night. Some of this may change after January, 2014, when he marries Ashley Shaw-Scott in an Anglican ceremony at St. Paul’s Cathedral, in London, with Chris Ofili as his best man. (The day before, they will have a traditional Ghanaian wedding.) They met in New York, in 2005, when Shaw-Scott, who had recently graduated from Stanford, went to hear him lecture. She was twenty-four then, and Adjaye was thirty-eight. His lecture style was so quiet that she picked up her shopping bags and moved to the front row, and went up to speak with him afterward. He asked her to have dinner with him. She declined to do that, or to give him her telephone number, but she asked for his business card, and eventually she called him. After several dates, he asked her to marry him. Neither of them had been married before, and, since Shaw-Scott’s parents had not bothered with marriage, she wasn’t interested. (Her father, who died last year, was a building contractor in the Bay Area; her mother trained as an architect.) A few months later, she went off to Japan with a boyfriend. That didn’t work out, and during the next few years she and Adjaye saw each other periodically, as friends. Shaw-Scott worked as an online clothing buyer, did some modelling for the Ford agency, and got a degree in business management from the INSEAD school, in Fontainebleau, outside Paris. They were both seeing other people, but Shaw-Scott’s father urged Adjaye not to give up on her, and he didn’t.
They began living together three years ago, and in 2012, in a boat off the coast of Kenya, he said, “I have a question. Will you marry me?” She said, “Absolutely.” They want to have children. Shaw-Scott, who describes her ancestry as “sixty per cent Yoruba, thirty per cent Russian and Finnish, and ten per cent Middle Eastern,” looks forward to spending time in Ghana when Adjaye builds a house on a beach property that his father gave him some years back. (It is close to the house he built for Kofi Annan.) Affram turned ninety this year; Cecelia still “rules the roost,” as Peter Adjaye put it.
Adjaye had never seen the Gilded Age mansions of Newport, Rhode Island. Many of them are open to the public, and one day in mid-August my wife and I took him through the Breakers, the biggest and most gilded of them all, which Richard Morris Hunt designed for Cornelius Vanderbilt II in 1893. His response was lively and interested. “It’s a remaking of the classical, once again,” he said, “but there’s nothing like it in Europe, even though it’s copied from European models. I was struck by the extraordinary level of craftsmanship in the details. I counted easily forty different materials, including platinum leaf. Gold and silver are pretty normal, but platinum!” The week before, he had been in Shanghai, and he was going back there the next morning. As we drove him to the train station, I asked about the latest developments on the Museum of African American History and Culture. The outlook for the bronze panels was very good, he said, and the Smithsonian had contracted an American foundry in Ohio to cast them. “Now the fight is about the entrance-hall ceiling. I’m hopeful that we’ll get it, but at this point I really don’t know.”
He paused for a moment, and then said, with more emphasis, “This is the defining project of my career. I started with libraries and other buildings that try to communicate ideas about how we deal with the world now. I could never have imagined that I would be working on the Washington Mall, which is probably the most important public space in the world, but in some ways I feel like I was programmed to understand this building. I’ve experienced African history, and I’ve learned that it’s almost impossible to understand American history without understanding the history of slavery and the Civil War. This building, coming on the Mall in a way most people could never have believed, proves to me how more and more amazing America is, even with its difficulties, in dealing with traumatic issues and working through them. The American civil-rights movement was critical to the way the independence movement happened in Africa, and I think this building could provide a model to Africa about the complexity of history. Things often come at the time they’re meant to come, even if they seem late.”
I was reminded of something he had told me earlier, about the museum: “It has made it possible for me to speak as an architect, rather than an artist working in a vacuum. This is the best time in my life.” ♦
