"As cities grow, and as the experience of urbanism becomes overwhelming or intoxicating, I think the notion of the domestic retreat becomes more and more important."
Suddenly, David Adjaye is everywhere. For someone whose career follows a rather straightforward trajectory—–from designing private homes to building public institutions—–Adjaye has had no trouble at all finding new clients. Even more, this young, London-based architect has already cracked North America: Adjaye wasn’t even 40 years old before Stateside commissions began to appear—–including one for a brand-new Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver, Colorado. On a recent trip through the U.S., David Adjaye sat down with us to talk about architecture, public space, LEED certification, and the future of the African city.
When I say the house is an “emotional landscape,” I mean in relation to how the client wants to live their life. As cities grow, and as the experience of urbanism becomes overwhelming or intoxicating, I think the notion of the domestic retreat becomes more and more important. It’s the respite, the refuge, the regenerator.
I also think that the idea of the modern house has been completely done; it’s just a matter of the market taking it up and delivering it. The idea of excellent plumbing, or excellent services, is not really as interesting for me, as an architect, as the pursuit of the domestic realm. I want to explore what else that realm can be.
I find there are two types of content to deal with, always. There’s one type of content where the architecture needs to sit back so that the content can play its role more effectively. Then there’s an architecture where the content needs the architecture to animate it.
With the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver, the building is really about setting up a new kind of monumentality—–not just to be impressive, but to play a very powerful and inclusive role within the community, to define publicness when there might not be any. If one is making buildings in the public realm, then one has to be in discourse with the end user, to inform the public so that they understand what buildings do and what they don’t do, what the process is, and how the public can become involved. That’s half the battle—–having that conversation with your public.
LEED certification is a lower standard than what I would want to do in a building, to be honest. It is the way a building should already be. We’re on track now to get a Gold certification—–which is the first one for a contemporary art museum in this country. I find that hilarious, considering the amount of museums being built here!
But I hope this little pebble of a project helps start that conversation.
The problem is that there is no body or guild which seems to be educating the industry. It’s a cost-driven, lowest-common-denominator culture—–which gives you efficiency in terms of capitalism, but it doesn’t give you evolution. And we have to evolve the notion of construction. Really, builders should be bringing these things to architects. That would be the ideal, within five years—–not the way it is now, where I’m going, “Can you please use this groundwater heater?” And they’re going, “Oh my God, I’ve never used that thing before! I don’t know how to do it.”
It was really just an archive that I started. I was extremely interested in a sort of anthropological survey of the continent in the 21st century, when its image is still predominantly that of poverty. If there is an image of an African city, rarely do you see a skyline; you see a shantytown or a village or a mud hut.
I’ve found that even architectural students have no idea about the urban quality of African cities! We know South American cities; we know Asian cities like the backs of our hands; we know European cities because they’ve been done to death; we don’t know the last continent.
It’s not a book about architectural style; it’s about the way in which these buildings are used and the way in which the urbanism of the city works.
The African continent has a very particular quality—–and I fear that this quality is being lost by leaders who are trying to replicate places like Los Angeles or Chicago. But from my point of view, Chicago is a 19th-century city; it’s really not the way to plan a city now—–with this massive infrastructure that gets decrepit and falls apart and is impossible to update because it’s too expensive. There’s got to be a better way to think about the city.
