Jonathan Morrison
Architect, innovator, mentor: David Adjaye’s latest incarnation
David Adjaye has designed international museums, art installations, celebrity homes and the Nobel Peace Center in Oslo, but his latest project with Rolex saw him coaching a young architect who wants to transform how African cities are built. By Jonathan Morrison
If you covered the whole of Texas in skyscrapers, like Manhattan, you could fit the entire population of the world into it,” the British-Ghanaian architect David Adjaye says, sitting in his black-walled, raw-concrete-ceilinged headquarters just off Edgware Road in London, surrounded by scale models of his latest designs. “So maybe that’s the prototype for future cities. The problem is that we’ve gone from a billion people to eight billion in just 100 years. The urban population is growing faster than it can be housed properly. And nowhere is that more true than in Africa.”
Between now and 2045 an average of 24 million Africans are expected to move from the countryside to cities every year, according to the management consultancy McKinsey. In 2018 the UN predicted that the ten fastest growing cities until 2035 would be African. A World Bank study released in 2017 predicted that the urban population of Africa would more than double from 472 million to more than a billion by 2050. This poses challenges for the continent’s leaders, not always noted for their altruistic planning.
All of which helps explain why the dapper Adjaye, 53, has been spending a lot of his time recently on an intricate cluster of five raw-earth buildings in Niger. And he is always short of time: perennially late, perpetually hurried, strung out between continents yet somehow focused and measured, the unruffled and erudite eye of his own storm.
Adjaye, whose father was a Ghanaian diplomat, was born in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and moved to London at the age of 13. He went to school in Hampstead before studying at London South Bank University and then the Royal College of Art, where he became friends with the Turner prizewinning artist Chris Ofili, who would go on to be Adjaye’s best man when he married the American model Ashley Shaw-Scott in 2014.
It was through Ofili that Adjaye got his big break; he turned a derelict house into Ofili’s studio. That project was followed by A-list commissions from the artist Jake Chapman, fashion designer Alexander McQueen and actor Ewan McGregor. Adjaye then turned his attention to a series of innovative public projects, starting with the Whitechapel Idea Store, a library that in 2006 was shortlisted for the Stirling prize, and culminating in the $540-million National Museum of African American History on the National Mall in Washington. The museum, an upturned ziggurat of bronze, was inspired by the shrine houses of the Yoruba people from west Africa, who were disproportionately affected by slavery. Completed in 2016, it earned him a knighthood and a place in Time magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people in 2017.
In 2018 Adjaye was approached by the Danish-Icelandic sculptor Olafur Eliasson, a friend of his, to take part in the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative, a philanthropic programme that matches established practitioners with emerging talents and funds a period of intense collaboration. “My team were asking, ‘Why the hell are you doing this?’ ” he says. “‘You don’t have the time, and you’re going to end up killing us.’ ”
Out of four shortlisted candidates, Adjaye chose Mariam Kamara, who was born in France, grew up in Niger and moved to the US at the age of 18 to study. Kamara, who at the time was 38, married and a mother of one, had anything but a typical background in architecture, having worked as a successful software developer for startups in New York and Seattle until the age of 30.
David Adjaye and Mariam Kamara visit a market she designed in Dandaji (ROLEX/THOMAS CHÉNÉ)
“I had some sort of crisis at 30,” she admits. “It hadn’t seemed reasonable to study something creative when you come from the part of the world I come from – people want to be doctors and engineers – but the desire to study architecture never left me and I became more aware of what it can do socially, economically and in terms of the environment.”
She had already returned to Niger to train people in website design and, when she graduated as an architect at 34, she collaborated with her professor on an eco-friendly housing project, using local materials and techniques, in her home city of Niamey before embarking on a series of small projects, including a library and a modest marketplace. Four years later, Rolex came calling.
“It wasn’t nerve-racking at first because I was convinced I wasn’t going to win; I just wanted to meet David,” she says. “Then afterwards I was too much in awe and that was the most difficult thing to surmount. But David taught me to be much bolder and gave me the confidence and tools to push my vision to its full potential. And when David believes in you, it’s beyond encouraging. But it was important for him that it wasn’t too academic; he was more interested in figuring out what I wanted to do and helping me achieve that.”
Mariam Kamara working at Atelier Masomi (ROLEX/THOMAS CHÉNÉ)
What she wanted to do was transform the city she grew up in by giving it a new heart: a Southbank Centre for Niger, housing a municipal library, galleries and performance areas. It would be built by local craftsmen using traditional techniques and offer a rare secular space for people of all ages to congregate. Tall, crescent towers would capture the breeze and provide shade throughout the day. In a city of walled domesticity, it would be open and inviting. And, most importantly, it would join the two halves of Niamey, the former French and native quarters, by straddling the valley that divides them.
Kamara and Adjaye collaborated across time zones via text and Skype, but Adjaye also spent a period living in her father’s village, “seeing Niger through her eyes”, he says. “It was a genuinely beautiful exchange.”
Kamara maintains that she has not found it especially difficult to work within a male-dominated, conservative Islamic society. “All societies are male-dominated and it’s actually no different to working in the US, where the challenges are fairly similar,” she says. But there’s no doubt a little of Adjaye’s stardust helped to open doors. So how much input did he have on the design process for the project, on which work is expected to begin this year?
“We’ve developed this very intimately,” he says. “I wouldn’t it say it was co-authored, but she has been heavily guided. She’s never done a building like this before in her life, but I do this all the time. So I’ve been teaching her.
“But young architects should be thrown in the deep end — with support and endorsement — because we need to get away from this notion that members of the profession only really come of age in their fifties. Especially in Africa, where they are going to need clever people who are able to communicate their ideas.
“So, hopefully this project will put her at the political and cultural centre of her country. Up until the twentieth century, architecture was political. In the 20th century it became technical, and the trauma of planners and politicians taking over is something it never recovered from. You could argue that it died. So we now need to show that we bring something to the game of how cities are made that can’t be underplayed. What happens in the urban realm is going to be critical for the 21st century, especially in Africa. And we need champions and models.”
Yet what can one building, one role model, do in the face of so much upheaval and change? The figures are stark: in 2015 the UN estimated that, worldwide, three million people were moving to cities, where the wealth is largely concentrated, every week. Urbanisation is happening at a very quick lick, and architecture is very slow. Not for nothing did Adjaye insist that his mentorship programme be extended to two years, in contrast to the single year awarded to the other disciplines.
“We can’t speed up the process of producing good architecture,” he says. “And because of the industrialisation of construction, putting up any old rubbish is very fast. There aren’t many proper leaders and people put up whatever they can.
“Good models shift the wind. We’ve seen that in China and the Middle East, where four or five good buildings in a city change the landscape and everyone starts to lift their game. One good building in a place where bad buildings are being built changes the culture, deflects certain trajectories, steers public opinion. Boom – suddenly everyone wants good architecture. That’s the true power of a project like this.”
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