Jonathan Morrison
‘If I’d known how difficult architecture would be, I wouldn’t have done it’
David Adjaye talks to Jonathan Morrison about racism, the Smithsonian and a new Holocaust memorial, as his show opens at the Design Museum
Looking back, David Adjaye describes it simply as “eight years of pain”. He has said before that it felt like a “bloodbath”. The criticism he received was “deeply hurtful” and he felt as though he “was being shredded”. “If an excuse could be found to attack it, it was found,” he says. “It was a struggle. I was tempted to walk away, but that’s the one thing I’ll never do.”
It is rare to hear an architect talk about one of his projects with such regret, even horror. Especially if it’s the one that made him an international superstar, with photoshoots and hagiographies in Vogue and GQ, a berth in Time magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people of 2017 and, shortly afterwards, a knighthood. And if it dominated his life from 2009 and his final sales pitch to what he describes as “a room full of gods — Oprah Winfrey, Colin Powell, Barbara Bush, Kenneth Chenault [the former chief executive officer of American Express]”, it also rescued him from bankruptcy.
By the time the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture opened in September 2016, filling the final slot on Washington DC’s National Mall of lauded institutions and marble monuments, most of the critics had been well and truly silenced. A three-tiered, upside-down ziggurat clad in bronze, partly based on the “shrine houses” of the Yoruba from west Africa, who were disproportionally affected by slavery, it could not be more different from its neoclassical neighbours. Tickets were sold out for months afterwards.
“I thought about what someone coming back from that time would want to see,” explains Adjaye, who is the subject of a new exhibition at the Design Museum in London on his public monuments. “Some people didn’t like the design and thought Washington should be about white stone, but I wanted the silhouette to tell you immediately that something significant was happening in a significant location.
“Most blacks in the US feel like second-class citizens, so to be on the Mall and counted as part of the community, able to enjoy a view [from the belvedere at the top] that is normally reserved for senators was something so strong. And already in my mind it was a memorial to a terrible trauma, not just a museum.”
Although the filigree walls are a determined reference to the wrought-iron balconies fashioned by slaves in Charleston and New Orleans, incorporating so many African elements was a potentially dangerous decision. Of all the barbs, the one that stung the most was that Adjaye, who was born in Dar es Salaam in Tanzania to a Ghanaian diplomat, was far more African than African-American. “It was a new kind of attack. It was tragic to see this tension between Africans and African-Americans,” he says, “but ultimately to see a black team deliver and be successful — there was no precedent for that. The attacks stopped when the skin of the building emerged.”
Of course, Adjaye, who grew up in Britain from the age of 13, experienced plenty of racism at school in Hampstead or while starting out in 1990s London — it was, he says, “a given” — and is hardly alone in identifying that his profession is still far too white, middle class and male. He’d like more representation of minorities, but racial politics are something he largely shrugs off with his unusual mix of grit and charm.
“Saying you were a ‘black architect’ was putting yourself in the ghetto, but for me there was no discomfort in it,” he says. “Thankfully, our culture has been totally transformed in the last decade. There’s been an explosion of interest in identity and now there’s a deep pride in speaking of your position. But if I’d known how difficult architecture would be to start with, I probably wouldn’t have done it. And I’d have had to give up if I’d started worrying about where the work was coming from. Instead I found an opportunity in every piece of work I did.”
In fact, his interest in architecture began only after the family moved to London, necessitated when one of his two younger brothers, Emmanuel, succumbed to a serious illness and was paralysed. His father took a job at the Ghanaian embassy to have access to the best medical treatment; David, for his part, became uncomfortably aware “that the world was designed for a certain type of body” and was pushed in a creative direction by a high-school teacher. A degree from London South Bank University and a master’s from the Royal College of Art (RCA) followed.
Gwangju River Reading Room in South Korea (DESIGN MUSEUM)
After graduating he worked on whatever he could find, “on film sets and furniture”, setting up his first practice in 1994. A chance meeting with Chris Ofili, the Turner prizewinning artist he had known as a fellow student at the RCA, led to a commission to turn a nearby derelict house into a studio. From there a series of homes for other artists and the odd celebrity followed: Jake Chapman, Juergen Teller, Alexander McQueen, Ewan McGregor. Ofili remains a close friend and collaborator and was best man at Adjaye’s wedding to Ashley Shaw-Scott, an American model, in 2014; they have two children, aged four and one.
In 2000 he launched Adjaye Associates, which employs 120 staff and has offices in London, New York and Accra, the capital of Ghana, and developed a reputation for undertaking innovative public projects as well as A-list mansions — notably the Whitechapel Idea Store, which aimed to reinterpret what a library could do and was shortlisted for the 2006 Stirling prize, and Rivington Place, London’s first new-built international art gallery for 40 years, which was completed in 2007.
Not all of his projects went smoothly. Janet Street-Porter famously said she dreamt of “ritually disembowelling” Adjaye after the house he designed for her sprang leaks. And there was a degree of schadenfreude when Adjaye, sometime BBC presenter, Princeton professor, designer of choice to the celebs, best mate of Brad Pitt and dabbler in fashion and music, was badly hit by the 2008 banking crisis — as were many other architects — and put his firm into a company voluntary arrangement to stave off insolvency. “Downfall of the showman” was how The Independent gleefully headlined the story. “I never said I was a showman, but, sure, you’ve got to be a presenter,” he counters.
Then came the National Museum of African American History and Culture, that half-a-billion-dollar behemoth, and the financial crisis was over. Fast-forward to 2019 and Adjaye is firmly in the firmament, working on prestigious projects across the globe — a master plan for part of San Francisco, a skyscraper in Manhattan and a cathedral in Accra. Africa features heavily in his future plans and he has visited all 54 countries in 11 years.
Adjaye, 52, is busy, busy, busy — whisked in late to give lectures, carted off early to make flights — but he hasn’t quite embraced the good life yet. And if the Smithsonian commission was bruising, he doesn’t seem to have lost his appetite for a fight: he’s keen to talk about his design for a Holocaust Memorial in Westminster, which threatens to become at least as politically contentious as his museum on the National Mall, maybe more so.
He finds a bone to pick. “Lots of journalists have written that it should go elsewhere,” he says, and it’s undeniable: the tiniest of the Royal Parks, Victoria Tower Gardens, will, at least during construction, be significantly altered by his subterranean scheme, developed with the Israeli sculptor Ron Arad. Old plane trees are likely to be killed off en masse as their roots are severed. Yet the choice of site was hardly his, was it?
Sclera Pavilion in London (DESIGN MUSEUM)
“I’m excited about the site. Britain was the only one of the Allies that felt it didn’t need to mark it, so you almost can’t find anything about the Holocaust here. And the park’s been turned into a sort of memorial garden already — with monuments to the abolition of slavery, not slavery itself, of course, and women’s suffrage — so we have the opportunity to activate the entire site and talk directly to parliament, hold it accountable. Disrupting the pleasure of being in a park is key to the thinking.”
Has he been surprised by the reaction? Prominent Jewish peers and intellectuals have already campaigned vigorously against the scheme and have promised further action now that it’s going through the planning process. Some MPs and many local residents are also up in arms.
“The Jewish community has been very keen not to be seen for the last 70 years. They’ve looked for invisibility and integration. So there’s a real fear of being put front and centre. That’s normal. But this will use the Jewish experience as a lens — it addresses the bigger issue of intolerance. We live in splintered times. It would be nice to think that architecture can help us understand the issues we’re facing. Or at least make us think about them.
“If people want to protest, they should protest, but, you know, I’m just not very good at walking away.”
Sprinting, on the other hand, seems to be less of a problem. With that he’s gone: another meeting, another flight, another continent beckons.
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