Jonathan Morrison
David Adjaye: the Royal Gold Medal winning architect has designs on our future
He may just have won a lifetime achievement award, but the architect tells Jonathan Morrison he’s only just getting started — with London’s controversial Holocaust memorial next on the agenda
It will help open doors, and we all need doors opening,” David Adjaye says placidly after winning the 2021 Royal Gold Medal, usually considered one of the highest honours that can be bestowed on an architect in recognition of a lifetime’s work. Still, at the relatively young age of 54, and with many of his projects still in the pipeline, perhaps the biggest surprise should not be that it has taken the Royal Institute of British Architects (Riba) 173 years to award it to a black practitioner, but that it has taken so long to award it to Adjaye, who has been knocking down doors like a dawn raid for years.
He likes awards and is generous in his acceptance of this one; it is “very gratifying to have your work acknowledged by your peers”, he says. He acknowledges that it’s a “bit sad that I’m the only black architect to have won it, but it’s better late than never” — although to be fair to Riba, which technically presents the bauble on behalf of the Queen, it did give it to the Iraqi-born Zaha Hadid, the first woman to win it in her own right, as recently as 2016.
It could be seen as convenient timing for Riba, which continues to wrestle with the under-representation of ethnic minorities in the profession, since only 1 per cent of registered architects identify as black. It was also plunged into a period of soul-searching in 2015, when it was accused of “institutionalised racism” by the architect Elsie Owusu, who had stood to be a vice-president at the professional body (Riba said that it “does not condone any form of discrimination or harassment”). Then in recent months there has been widespread coverage of Black Lives Matter and protests against statues linked to slavery.
The Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington DC, designed by Adjaye )ALAN KARCHMER)
“I hope it wasn’t political; I didn’t get the impression it was political,” Adjaye says, looking a little hurt at the suggestion. “But of course there needs to be more consciousness of the under-representation of black and ethnic minorities in architecture. Their exclusion needs to be tackled.”
While he tends to sidestep questions about ethnicity and says that he “doesn’t want to talk endlessly about racism”, he accepts that he has become an important role model, even if it is a little unwillingly.
“It’s a heavy thing being put on a gilded pedestal,” he says. “I’ve spent my whole career making the craft more accessible to people from diverse backgrounds, so hopefully when they see me they realise it’s doable. When I began studying there were no black architects; now there are a few. But London, given its ethnic make-up, should have far more.”
Adjaye, who was born in Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, the son of a Ghanaian diplomat, arrived in London at 13 when his brother Emmanuel was paralysed after an illness and the family moved to have better access to healthcare. Based on his experience, he believes the answer to exclusion lies in greater encouragement at school, something he failed to receive. He recalls that a teacher tried to dissuade him from studying architecture, believing it was an unsuitable profession for someone of his race. “I was shocked to be judged on colour,” he says. “But then there’s not a black kid in London that doesn’t experience racism or some sort of racial rejection.”
Adjaye: “I’ve spent my whole career making the craft more accessible to people from diverse backgrounds, so hopefully when they see me they realise it’s doable”
He studied at the London South Bank University and the Royal College of Art (RCA), but initially struggled to find work, making ends meet by working “on film sets and furniture” before setting up his first practice in 1994. He got his break when a chance meeting with Chris Ofili, the Turner prize-winning artist he had known at the RCA, led to a commission to turn a derelict house into a studio and won plaudits. A series of homes for other celebrities followed, including Jake Chapman, Alexander McQueen, Ewan McGregor and, less happily, Janet Street-Porter, who famously declared that she dreamt of “ritually disembowelling” Adjaye after her house sprang leaks. Ofili remains a friend and was best man at Adjaye’s wedding to Ashley Shaw-Scott, an American model and business consultant, in 2014; the couple have two children.
Adjaye’s star waned briefly during the 2008 banking crash — he had to put his firm into a company voluntary arrangement — but he recovered quickly and finally won the project that would propel him to a knighthood in 2017 and into the firmament: the $540 million National Museum of African American History and Culture on the National Mall in Washington DC, which was partially inspired by the shrine houses of the Yoruba tribe from west Africa, a people who were disproportionately affected by slavery. Adjaye did not have an easy time of it, though, and the nine-year process was punctuated by frequent public criticism and ended up, he says, “like something out of Dante”.
“I’d have to be psychotic to have enjoyed it, but when you touch nerves and probe something hidden you get a reaction. Then when it was revealed the criticism evaporated, which gave me a lot of confidence. The worst thing as a designer is not having confidence.”
Nonetheless, the process seems to be repeating itself with one of Adjaye’s biggest projects in the UK: the £102 million Holocaust Memorial and Learning Centre proposed for the small royal park next to the Houses of Parliament, which has been met by opposition from local residents, environmentalists and Jewish groups and is the subject of a planning inquiry. This week the communities secretary, Robert Jenrick, revealed that his family had been subjected to antisemitic abuse and death threats over his support for the project. In The Times on Thursday Rabbi Jonathan Romain argued: “If there is to be another museum, let it be to Jewish life and Jewish contribution to wider society, but not to dead Jews and Jewish victimhood.”
The Contemplative Court at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture
Adjaye is unrepentant. “It’s completely the right project for the site — the fact that people have been getting threats over it shows how important it is,” he says. “If it’s turning into an endurance test, it’ll be all the more rewarding to get through.”
I suggest that by taking on such vicious battles, he must have an element of masochism. He counters: “I’m a workaholic not a masochist. Talk to my family and they think I have no life. But I’m not interested in an easy life and the agenda of the office is becoming ever more ambitious.”
That much is clear: his in-tray contains a national cathedral for Ghana, an unusual skyscraper in Manhattan, a financial centre in Senegal and a memorial in Brixton, south London, to Cherry Groce, who was shot in a botched police raid in 1985, which he says is a project that feels deeply personal. “I’m a north London boy, but Brixton is a culturally important part of London and that period reflects my time in London as a student.”
Specere, Kielder Forest — a stark, contemporary shelter designed by Adjaye
Yet, potentially, his most revolutionary work is yet to come. Adjaye, who lives in Accra, Ghana, is already proposing entirely new forms of architecture, such as the first Abrahamic place of worship in Abu Dhabi, which will bring the three dominant faiths of the area together on one site for the first time and which will be ready in about three years. In Accra he is experimenting with urban farms to make the city self-sustaining. He is rethinking the nature of the office in the wake of the pandemic to make it a viable mix of inside and outside spaces. Perhaps no other prominent architect gazes so much more at the future than at their past achievements.
“We’re on the precipice of a very different world,” he says. “There’s going to have to be a profound change in the way we do things, regardless of whether there’s a vaccine for Covid or not, and architecture needs to be at the centre of the conversation.
“I’m now most interested in things that haven’t been thought about before. My creativity is fired by change and evolution, and it’s important to be romantic and dream as well. We know the extent to which it’s needed, just not what it is yet. Still, we’re in a good place to find out.”
You start to feel sorry for Riba. It can’t have been easy deciding when to give Adjaye a lifetime achievement award; it may have been overdue, but you get the feeling there’s at least another lifetime’s worth of work yet to come.
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