David Adjaye


Sir David Frank Adjaye is a British architect. He is known for designing many notable buildings around the world, including the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC, and the Skolkovo Moscow School of Management.
Adjaye was born in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. The son of a Ghanaian diplomat, he lived in Tanzania, Egypt, Yemen and Lebanon before moving to Britain at the age of nine. Upon graduating with a BA in Architecture from London South Bank University in 1990, he was nominated for the RIBA President's Medals, and won the RIBA Bronze Medal for the best design project produced at BA level worldwide. He graduated with an MA in 1993 from the Royal College of Art.

Career

Early projects

In 1993, the same year of graduation, Adjaye won the RIBA President's Medals Students Award, a prize offered for RIBA Part 1 projects, normally won by students who have only completed a bachelor's degree. Previously a unit tutor at the Architectural Association, he was also a lecturer at the Royal College of Art. After very short terms of work with the architectural studios of David Chipperfield and Eduardo Souto de Moura, Adjaye established a practice with William Russell in 1994 called Adjaye & Russell, based in North London. This office was disbanded in 2000 and Adjaye established his own eponymous studio at this point.
The studio's first solo exhibition, David Adjaye: Making Public Buildings, was shown at the Whitechapel Gallery in London in January 2006, with Thames and Hudson publishing the catalogue of the same name. This followed their 2005 publication of Adjaye's first book, David Adjaye Houses.

Firm operations

In February 2009, the cancellation or postponement of four projects in Europe and Asia forced the firm to enter into a Company Voluntary Arrangement, a deal to stave off insolvency proceedings which prevents financial collapse by rescheduling debts – estimated at about £1m – to creditors.

National Museum of African American History

On 15 April 2009, he was selected as one of a team of architects, which includes the Freelon Group, Davis Brody Bond and SmithGroup, to design the new $500 million National Museum of African American History and Culture, a Smithsonian Institution museum, on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. His design features a crown motif from Yoruba sculpture.

Other commissions

Alongside his international commissions, Adjaye's work spans exhibitions, private homes and artist collaborations. He built homes for the designer Alexander McQueen, artist Jake Chapman, photographer Juergen Teller, actor Ewan McGregor, and artists Tim Noble and Sue Webster. For artist Chris Ofili, he designed a new studio and a beach house in Port of Spain, Trinidad. He worked with Ofili to create an environment for The Upper Room, which was later acquired by Tate Britain and caused a nationwide media debate. Adjaye collaborated with artist Olafur Eliasson to create a light installation, Your black horizon, at the 2005 Venice Biennale. He has also worked on the art project Sankalpa with director Shekhar Kapur.
Adjaye coauthored two seasons of BBC's Dreamspaces television series and hosts a BBC radio programme. In June 2005, he presented the documentary Building Africa: Architecture of a Continent. In 2008, he participated in Manifesta 7 and the Gwangju Biennale.
He designed the new building for the Francis A. Gregory Neighborhood Library in Washington, D.C., which opened on 19 June 2012.
In 2015 he was commissioned to design a new home for the Studio Museum in Harlem.

Recent work

Recent works include the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver, the Nobel Peace Centre in Oslo and the Skolkovo Moscow School of Management, completed in 2010. He designed the interior of New York City's Spyscape museum.
Adjaye currently holds a Visiting Professor post at Princeton University School of Architecture. He was the first Louis Kahn visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and was the Kenzo Tange Professor in Architecture at Harvard Graduate School of Design. In addition, he is a RIBA Chartered Member, an AIA Honorary Fellow, a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Senior Fellow of the Design Futures Council. He is a member of the Advisory Council of the Barcelona Institute of Architecture and also serves as member of the Advisory Boards of the Barcelona Institute of Architecture and the LSE Cities Programme.
He was part of the team that designed the Petronia City project in the heart of Nana Kwame Bediako's Wonda World Estates 2000-acre mixed-use city development project, catering to the fast-growing oil and gas and mining sectors in the Western Region of Ghana.
Making Place: The Architecture of David Adjaye was on display at the Art Institute of Chicago from September 2015 to January 2016.
In March 2018 Adjaye Associates' designs for the National Cathedral of Ghana was unveiled by Ghanaian president Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo.
In February 2019 he stated that Britain needed a black culture museum.
In October 2019, the 14,000 square foot contemporary art center designed by Adjaye, Ruby City, opened in San Antonio, Texas.

Personal life

In 2014, Adjaye married business consultant Ashley Shaw-Scott. Chris Ofili was his best man.
Adjaye was featured in an advertising campaign for British luxury brand Dunhill in 2012. Adjaye has also worked on numerous collaborative projects with his brother Peter Adjaye, a musician.

Awards and honours

In 2006, Adjaye was shortlisted for the Stirling Prize for the Whitechapel Idea Store, built on the remains of a 1960s mall. He was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 2007 for services to British architecture. In 2016 he received the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's McDermott award, a $100,000 prize for excellence in the arts. Adjaye was knighted in the 2017 New Year Honours for services to architecture. In 2018, Adjaye received the Washington University International Humanities Medal. In 2019, he was a member of the Prix Versailles World Judges Panel.