BUILDING A VISION OF AFRICA AND THE PLANET

ARCHITECTURE

Building a vision of Africa and the planet

Award-winning architect Sir David Adjaye discusses a new way of looking at how we live in the world. His latest project is The Africa Institute in Sharjah.

By Nana Biamah-Ofosu

Sir David Adjaye is one of the most celebrated architects of his generation. His long list of architectural accomplishments began in 1993 when he won The Royal Institute of British Architects’ bronze medal for undergraduate students. Last year, he won the institute’s gold medal. Approved by the Queen, it is awarded to practitioners who have contributed significantly to the architectural profession. From his office in Accra, Sir David speaks with Nana Biamah-Ofosu about the importance of his work in redefining the Black and Arab experience.

You were born in Dar es Salaam and have lived in Egypt, Yemen, Lebanon and Britain. How have these places shaped your relationship with architecture?

What you expose a person to in their youth has a huge impact on how they see the world. The experience of being born in the “Global South” or for me, near the equator, and seeing the diversity of cultures as the first image of civilisation, and then moving to the desert regions of the Middle East before the colder climates of Europe, allowed me to see from an early age that the planet was populated in very different ways. That had a profound effect on me—it has always made me aware that there’s more than one world.

THE AFRICA INSTITUTE in Sharjah examines the common language of the continent’s architecture and scales it up into a 21st century infrastructure.

You won both The Royal Institute of British Architects’ bronze and gold medals, and you did it at only 54, making you oneof the gold medal’s youngest recipients. Tell us about your project that won a bronze medal, a proposal for a respite centre based on your brother’s needs, and how it relates to architecture’s most important role—to improve lives?

From the early stages of my architectural evolution, my motivations were always more activist than strictly typological. I was interested in how architecture collaborated with political power and social constructs to deliver a poor agenda for those who are underprivileged. Specifically for my degree, I was concerned with the injustices of the city towards those that are not able bodied. That was of course a reflection of my lived experience of having a younger brother who is mentally and physically handicapped. I chose a completely different trajectory, at the height of the deconstructivism movement, which was to look beyond form, to see architecture as a vehicle for empowerment, social justice and opportunity. The scheme was about bringing that typology into the urban experience, making it a high design space while seeming ordinary—that for me is the radicality of the project. I was thrilled that the judges recognised the power of the project, in its ability to reposition architecture as more than just the act of building but as a calling to use its power to create opportunities for others.

With offices in London, New York and Accra, how do you balance the vision of a global practice and the specificity of your architecture?

I don’t see my practice as a global practice, and I think it is evident in the way we work, in a decentralised model. The idea of a global practice is rooted in a colonial mentality—an empire at the centre from which one holds control, goes out into the world, but ultimately returns to. The decentralised strategy recognises that the context of different places requires different teams immersed in the local condition to produce good architecture. I believe in a planetary science, not a global science. I am more interested in working across the planet, acknowledging that I’m working across different continental plates with varied evolutions and conditions.

Adjaye Associates has opened an office in Accra. Work on the NATIONAL CATHEDRAL OF GHANA, and other projects, required a deep engagement with the continent.

Projects such as the Thabo Mbeki Presidential Library in Johannesburg, the Edo Museum of West African Art in Benin City, Nigeria, and the Martyrs Memorial in Niamey, Niger, are positioning Africa as a place to be looked at seriously. You moved to Ghana for the National Cathedral project. Why is that important, to be situated in and working on the continent?

It was clear to me that to work on the cathedral and subsequently other projects, I needed to have a deep engagement with the continent. My time in the US—moving to New York, teaching at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard, working in Washington, DC—embedded in me a different sensibility and ethos of being situated in the context that I didn’t appreciate when I was flying in and out of London. I took this with me to Ghana, along with an 11-year study of the continent—the book Adjaye, Africa, Architecture was a record of an agenda to see every part of this continent and its civilisations. When the opportunities to make significant work on the continent finally arose, I was prepared, having understood the kind of infrastructure required to work here, to navigate the conditions that come with working on the continent—to be able to look seriously and speak from within. My relocation to Ghana also came at a time when I had become a very public figure and I felt a sense of responsibility for how I used this status. It was important to create a change agenda within a context where that privilege can be leveraged to shine light on important projects, the growth of the continent and its new crop of leaders that are trying to change the narrative.

You are also working in the Middle East, where you are designing The Africa Institute in Sharjah. What does this project mean for your office?

The Sharjah project is one of a garland of projects on what I call structural readjustments. These began in conversation with my dear friend Okwui Enwezor, thinking about Sharjah Biennial 15: Thinking Historically in the Present. Together with Salah M. Hassan and Chika Okeke-Agulu, we had deep discussions about what it meant to turn the light away from simply the struggle of Black and brown identity in the Western world and towards building an infrastructure for the other half of the world. Projects such as Rivington Place, the Stephen Lawrence Centre were fundamentally the beginning of this for me. The National Museum of African American History and Culture has also made a seismic contribution to this aim, as well as projects like the Bed-Stuy Restoration Plaza we are working on. With such projects in Europe and America, we began to ask, where else was the Black experience happening and where is there a lack of infrastructure? The other question which has been neglected for a long time was the profound relationship between the Arab world and Africa that has created hybrid and interwoven cultures in East Africa and the Islamic cultures of West Africa. Absurdly, the study of this relationship has been left to a few Western institutions with no centres of excellence in the places where these cultures exist. The idea of the institute is preceded by Africa Hall and the Symposium on African-Arab Relations in 1976 organised by His Highness Sheikh Dr. Sultan bin Mohamed Al Qasimi. As president [of The Africa Institute] his daughter, Hoor Al Qasimi, has continued this activism. We often talk about the Arab influence on Africa at the expense of examining how Africa interpreted the Arab world and what the continent has given and keeps giving to Europe, America and the Arab world—it is our culture and our diaspora which is diffused and hybridised to make the unique identities that are taken for granted. The Africa Institute in Sharjah is recognising that architecture is infrastructural and the theatre for our lives.

SUGAR HILL is a mixed-use development in Manhattan’s historic Sugar Hill district of Harlem featuring affordable housing, early education programmes and a new cultural institution.

A GIFT OF LIFE

What does it mean to celebrate these histories through architecture?

This project [in Sharjah] celebrates Africa’s cultural history, which for too long has been written off as primitivist when it couldn’t be more relevant for the challenges the world faces in the 21st century. The principles used here are well-known on the continent—the courtyard building, passive shading, the layering of communality and separation, the use of form and mass as a strategy for sustainability. Because of colonisation, Africa hasn’t had the kind of mechanical technology that produces frivolity and discharges you from the responsibility of place. To observe these models and learn from them without prejudice is the basis of the Sharjah project; it examines the common language of the continent’s architecture and scales it up into a 21st century infrastructure. It is up to us, as architects of colour, to celebrate and elevate African knowledge, define it within institutional space, build infrastructure from it, and ultimately make it visible as logical references for the 21st century.

Light and shadow, form and monumental scale, materiality and colour, the courtyards and compounds feel like the main ingredients of your architecture. These elements also allude to environmental concerns.

You’ve outlined the toolkit which repeats at whichever scale we are working at. It is a design strategy built from the privilege of being able to travel around the world and see works that really moved me—from Oscar Niemeyer in Brazil, or Luis Barragán in Mexico, or Kenzo Tange in Japan, Hassan Fathy in Egypt, even John Soane in London—and understanding how the toolkit you’ve described could create architecture that has a profound impact. Why does it have such a profound impact? It is because it is the palette and register of the planet. It fundamentally shakes us out of our artifice of the Anthropocene and moves us into a relationship with nature and the planet.

You have previously suggested that you do not want to be considered a role model. How do you reconcile this with your sense of responsibility?

What is perhaps often described as a conflict, belonging to the diaspora and with conflicting histories and worldviews, is a profound gift. It is exactly your strength because it gives you a sense of purpose. A conflict is purpose, and what you’re struggling against is that you have this thing that other people don’t have, it gives you focus, and that, together with professional ability is the most lethal weapon.