"What I'm doing is about the public, it's about people's lives," says British architect David Adjaye. "For me, the whole point of architecture is to elevate the human experience."
Born in Tanzania to Ghanaian parents, Adjaye's heritage is threaded through his work - which ranges from the Nobel Peace Centre in Oslo, to the Ideas Store libraries in London's West End. In September, Adjaye will open his most significant project yet: the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, which will occupy the last space on the National Mall in Washington, DC. The three-tiered structure is sheathed in a bronze-coated aluminium façade, cut with Nigerian tribal Yoruba motifs - a homage to the enslaved ancestors of many African Americans.
In October, he'll release a book chronicling African architecture, based on his 11 years of travels on the continent. WIRED talked to Adjaye about the Smithsonian, his ambitions for the experience, and his thoughts on the future of architecture.
WIRED: You describe your buildings as "responsive" to their environments. What shaped this approach?
David Adjaye: I think the generation who were taught in the 80s and 90s became very weary of what I call the "spire wars" in architecture. Either you were a deconstructivist, or a post-modernist, or an urbanist. We were traumatised by this idea of having to follow a label. I learned that there was a way you could make bespoke architecture for each region: it came from thinking of the world as places each with their own quality of light, latitude, geographic and social concerns - and thinking that maybe architects should knead architecture to be more responsive and less of a generic block.
You've worked on public libraries, affordable housing, and museums: what draws you to projects?
It's not so much that it's something functional, but if it has something to do with the human experience - in terms of interacting, or exchanging, or facilitating something that we need - then I'm really interested in it. In the beginning it was the most mundane things: I was interested in where truck drivers had their coffee, or where taxi drivers went to meet - using architecture to create scenarios around those spaces to heighten them and make them special. It's to do with a belief that space is in the service of the human experience.
The new Smithsonian takes visitors through the history of slavery, the post-abolition migration of African Americans, and their contribution to American society today. What did you set out to accomplish?
We are making a museum that is not really about any particular artefact being valuable in the traditional sense. This is not the Met or the British Museum. This is really about stories; it couldn't just be a palace that we put things in and take things out of. It has to be a building which, from its very silhouette, its profile, is asking questions. It's talking to you and you're talking to it. It's hopefully a kind of call-and-response, which to me is a very beautiful way of seeing it. So it's a dialogue.
What was the design significance of the bronze façade?
The cladding is derived from the ironwork made by African American artisans in southern cities. It's variable in density, to control the amount of sunlight reaching the inner wall: during the daytime, the outer skin can be opaque at oblique angles, while allowing glimpses through to the interior at certain moments.
The building was constructed on the last plot on the National Mall: did you feel the weight of that responsibility?
Totally. It was a seismic jump for me in terms of working at a national level - where you have senators, Congress and the President intervening. And then you have citizens who feel that this is probably the most important project happening on the Mall. Plus, all the preservationists and historians saying this is the last building, it had better be right. And, you know, what exactly is "right"? It's the project that gave me my first grey hairs.
And the top tier will give visitors a view over the Mall.
The Mall is a beautiful set piece of American history. The museum gives you this extraordinary panorama, and you see everything - you see where Martin Luther King made his speech. Hopefully, by this point, you've made this journey where you've looked at the history of America and the African American community's contribution in a new way.
How has your heritage manifested in your own work?
It is not formulaic. Of course I draw from Africa - it's my heritage. But I draw from many other things as well, such as the abstraction found in African craftwork. The forms I'm looking at might be mud huts in Mali or Palladian homes. That's what a good architect does - draws from things he knows and, more broadly, the world.
Are there certain cities that are more receptive to change?
Architecture very quickly becomes conservative. The more developed the city, the less open it is to new things, sadly. You find radical ideas really coming up in emerging cities, which more established cities always sneer at. But those become the model for the future. Innovation happens when things are actually in flux. Entropy comes when people think they've got something that they don't want to lose.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
