David Adjaye

With controversy lingering over his personal conduct, three major new museums designed by David Adjaye open this month. Tim Abrahams goes beyond the scandal to explore his commitment to Africa’s cultural and social transformation.

Podcast transcript

David Adjaye: The article that the FT wrote really, destabilized a lot of people’s confidence in me.

And for me, it was deeply unfair but I get how news cycles work and I get how, I guess how stories work. And there wasn’t an interest in hearing my side of the story. There was just an interest in just destroying me. and I got caught in a sort of version of the #MeToo slam.

And what can I do? I, you can’t fight those kinds of social waves, all you can do is go underwater. Wait, let the wave go over and hope there’s something when you come up. And I didn’t want to, I didn’t want to wage a war against women.

I support women in my practice, my personal transgression with my wife, which I’ve had to deal with, is not something I wanted to have in a crazy, public arena. But I got what the social moment was, and it was, it, and I was a character.

I got hit and there were a couple people that were very upset with me because of what they wanted from me. They wanted to blackmail me, but they didn’t get what they wanted. And so you take the hit, people are like why don’t you just pay ’em off? It’s because I don’t want to be always looking behind my back .

I’d rather take this heat now and see what I can do later, but I’m free from it. You know what, if this is the world I have to inhabit, so be it. Luckily, I’m not a CEO of a bank where you just get fired. But I have my own business so I can find my way, and as long as I can find my way I’m fine.

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Tim Abrahams: Hello, Superurbanists. In 2023 , the FT wrote a story about David Adjaye and relations between a number of his female staff members. They said he had coerced him into sexual relations. Adjaye, as you have heard and in the article, denies it. Until this month when three key buildings open the Princeton University Art Museum in New Jersey, the Studio Art Museum in Harlem, New York, and in Nigeria, the Museum of West African Art or MOWAA as it is known 

This narrative has dominated Adjaye’s public profile and may still, these projects were all won when Adjaye, an African architect London raised and trained was deemed to be the perfect solution to commissioning bodies. Not just architecturally, but also I would say politically 

Princeton shows again that he’s a great architect.

He’s also more interestingly, at a key inflection point. Historically, the Museum of West African Art is at the heart of a commitment to Africa, which predates the FT story. It’s part of Adjaye’s involvement in a social transformation and cultural awakening. Not cultural awakening, cultural rebirth that is truly world historic.

It’s for that reason rather than his public image in the west. And I wanted to talk to him, particularly his involvement in a proposal to build 111 new district hospitals across Ghana, where his office is based east.

Tim Abrahams: When was the original plan done for these 111 projects?

David Adjaye: 2020. When was the pandemic? 2020-21.

Tim Abrahams: So it was done in immediate response.

David Adjaye: Literally immediate response.

Tim Abrahams: Could you describe exactly what it is that you’ve designed for those projects?

David Adjaye: One of the things I like to do, I said reduce. We have to deconstruct the idea of a hospital to the essential parts. So the components of the hospital. Are essentialized as pavilions. I wanted to not have any interstitial spaces in my project to get rid of all corridors and to just have a series of pavilions that are aggregated together and then to develop a series of walkways and gardens that stitch these pavilions together.

And that is the diagram to reduce the energy use to create a relationship to the outdoors from each sort of pavilion. And to create an architecture that can easily be a sort of, essentially it’s the spine system, which is this open corridor and then this plugging in of what you need onto this diagram to then create this matrix and to have that so reduced but hopefully by reducing it, making it for me, which I said was really important.

Relational to the external world. So it’s not just cellular that people are talking outside, they’re in courtyards, they’re discussing, patients can go outside. It’s a kind of much more like a compound or village. So the hospital is no longer this artificial box that you go to that you’re scared of, it’s most people are scared of hospitals and especially in West Africa, but it is a kind of network that’s similar to the world that you understand. This is the kind of infrastructure that we need to support the population, which is 30 plus million people. 

Tim Abrahams: And there are 111 sites across the country. . What degree did those sites vary? 

David Adjaye: So in our first analysis we were like, oh my God, but the country’s called mountains and hills, and what are they gonna do? What are we gonna do with it? And we did an analysis, I did the study and I was like, this is crazy.

It’s too much. If we just get random sites, this is gonna be crazy that people are gonna be trying to build stilts or whatever. And it would just blow all the budgets. So the first thing to do was to go visit all 111 sites with my teams and to work with the local ministries to basically choose two acres.

We did the plan of the building. So we, I worked out, this is what I need, based on what the Ministry of Health are telling me. This is what I need to do. The layer. I need two acres of land, and I can deliver housing for doctors. I can deliver the program for the hospitals, and I can deliver potential expansion around it.

Bang. And if you give me this and you give me a two acre land, which has no more than a gradient of two meters across it, something like that, I can make this work. And you found 111 sites, so let me just qualify a little bit. It’s about lemme get this absolutely right. It’s about 90 sites that are virgin and the rest, the 20 others are inner city existing hospitals that we were upgrading to have the right infrastructure. Yeah.

Tim Abrahams: But generally it was to find the 90 sites. 

David Adjaye: Correct. Approximately. So that’s what’s been built.

Tim Abrahams: Could you tie that into, MOWAA, which is opening in November this year. Perhaps you could describe the infrastructure that, that required , you’re talking about an initial project which is there to receive, ostensibly receive a particular number of artifacts, but in actual fact there’s a whole world behind it.

David Adjaye: So in a way the MOWAA project, after we relinquished the idea of making a major museum. And concentrate on the idea of the essential elements to kickstart the project. It meant that we identified a site that could allow us to expand over time.

And as skills increased to be able to deal with a sort of network that would start to become the arts network from the past. To the present, to the future, and so to and past, meaning literally a site of archeology. ’cause we are on the site of the original Royal Palace.

So there are excavations happening with the British Museum supporting, giving grants. There are archeologists working on the sites right now and they’ve excavated quite a lot of artifacts that are going to be in our museum.

There’s curatorial, there’s restoration and curatorial work. I know that. Basically the MOWAA are the team that helped with the Nigerian Modernism show that’s on right now at 

the Tate . 

A significant amount of paintings are in there. Were restored by the MOWAA teams that have now been in place for the past few years training. So the restoration and recovery teams. I say that to say that the work is happening, but essentially the infrastructure of building this one building with all these different parts and skills. And then laying the groundwork for a more, a changing gallery, a sort of flexible contemporary space that can have sort of seasonality workshops support sort of infrastructure and a network that connects across all these things to allow visitors to be able to visit this campus, including the audience hall and all that support stuff has been laid out by Adjaye Associates.

We’ve had to set out the sort of spine, body and brain of this thing. Ready for these organs, as I call them to plug in and to come into play. 

Tim Abrahams: It is such a fascinating story. You talk about the creation of a profession effectively of conservation. Not the creation

David Adjaye: The flourishing of it.

Tim Abrahams: In a regional context. You talked about the the plugging in of the other organs

David Adjaye: I think that what it starts to do is to value and elevate a professional class that didn’t have the infrastructure to, to produce excellence.

And in a way, the architecture is there to allow them to do their best work, to give them the support framework that they need. And so what we are now finding is that there’s great excitement about, seeing archeologists working in the city. The young kids that are, school leavers wanting to join and saying, this is fascinating.

Watching the painting restorations that happened with the sort of modernist works that were done for the Tate show, but the other shows that are happening, the discussions about loans to the UAE to India. It’s, it started everybody, I think the world has been wanting a relationship with. West Africa, but it hasn’t had the infrastructure to be able to be part of the network. And I think that this is the beginning of that, which then is creating, or rather these professionals exist, but actually enriching and elevating these networks of professionals and cross-pollinating them with their peers globally.

But allowing them to learn best practice, but to adapt it to what they need and how, what they, what their needs are on the ground. And I see the architectures being the support for that. 

Tim Abrahams: So I suppose that the conflict that there is over the Benin Bronzes or like who owns it, the Royal Palace, or whether it’s MOWAA’s is pretty small beer in comparison.

David Adjaye: We, as the architects, we think that this is a moot point. The point was the return. And for us: mission achieved, if there is a belief that we have the infrastructure to receive the objects. It is mission accomplished, and now how do we go from there?

How do we elevate these objects? These are beautiful conversations to have, even if it’s tense sometimes. For me it’s like we’re actually talking about making a center that the world’s most beautiful bronzes will be in and people will go to Benin to admire and enjoy those. That’s a great restitutional cultural return that allows Benin to reclaim its heritage and celebrate its identity globally. 

Tim Abrahams: So the funders from Germany are pleased MOWAA’s fulfilled the obligation and they’ve returned

David Adjaye: They’ve returned the objects, but obviously it’s a federal country, MOWAA is a quasi private public organization, so they can’t be given to MOWAA because it belongs to the nation.

So the bronzes first goes to the government and then this debate about. What do we do with National Treasure and who looks after it is being thrashed out? It’s not as straightforward as we all thought. It’s not just about giving it to MOWAA because MOWAA is an institution that’s a little bit like the, it’s a little bit like the American model.

It’s a kind of private public, it’s like the Whitney or the MoMA. It has a private component, which is why, how it’s able to happen, because it’s, our culture is not our priority for the government in the way that. It is now. But in terms of building its infrastructure, 

Tim Abrahams:just the sheer amount of money required.

David Adjaye: Correct. So it’s needed to be a kind of private public relationship, but then when you have the restitution of objects, which are of national significance, that requires a lot of discussion, both with the patrimony the sort of the group that has the patrimony which is the royal family and the state, and this new institution. It’s just not something that can just be done very quickly. So that has to be thrashed out. 

Tim Abrahams: It’s very difficult to get a historical frame on what, huge change you, you are witnessing in West Africa. It’s only something that can be built up through an impression. It’s the thing that really amazes me when you are talking how much has it changed?

 David Adjaye: I think that 2000 to now, the last 25 years have been an extraordinary explosion in the history of. Ghana and Nigeria.

So it aligns with an acceptance of the democratic and political processes, the establishment of key parties that seem to now dominate. And the idea that West Africa’s gonna try this experiment that everybody’s bought into. That we will try this. And so what it’s done is to allow the private sector to at least start to come in and feel that they can work around these two worlds and invest and do the things that the private sector should do to nation build.

And it’s also now allowing, finally, some governments to think about how we’re doing all these things, but maybe we can think about culture. And I think I speak specifically of Benin, the country. Which is this little sliver next to Nigeria, which is embarked on a massive cultural program. Because it’s got to that stage where it can think about that.

And also because we are also in a world where West Africa is reconnecting with its diaspora, both in Europe and in the US and it’s a significant economic enhancement of West Africa. Foreign direct remittances to west Africa has been a key part of the economic backbone of the support.

Families sending back money to support people in the villages has supported the economies of West Africa significantly but the return has elevated, I think, cannot be underestimated. Elevated the economic resilience of that model. And also started to, I think, excite and create the atmosphere for the cultural infrastructure that we’re starting to build.

MOWAA exists because of this umbrella of optimism about why not, why don’t we make West Africa how we want it to be? It’s shifted from being all that place that’s, oh God, it’s now a place where there’s a lot of excitement. It’s one of the reasons I moved back to Ghana.

I can live in London or in New York, or my wife is American, I’m British. We have. There are many possibilities but West Africa is so exciting. 

Tim Abrahams: Perhaps you could just build a picture of your, just office there. Where is it and how many people work there?

David Adjaye: So the office is in Accra. The airport is a little bit like what Hong Kong used to be with the airport right in the center of the city. Right in the middle of the city. And our office is very close to that. It’s called Airport Residential. It’s in this enclave and it’s in an existing building. I would love one day to build my own building and I’m working towards that. But essentially it is a large studio. It’s the largest studio I have of my three studios. It has over a hundred staff. It has a hundred and something odd staff and is growing. And it has become the office that is dealing with the continent wide. So we’re working from South Africa to Rwanda to Kenya, and we’re doing feasibilities in Senegal, et cetera. So it’s really working in Nigeria. It’s really become a sort of continent wide infrastructure and the teams that are being built in that studio are working in different areas. And, we send people to different countries to work, but it’s very quickly becoming not just a Ghanaian office and doing, we’re doing work in Accra very much. So the Accra office really deals with the sort of immense continent of Africa working across the different countries that we’ve now found ourselves in.

Working from Kenya to Rwanda, through to South Africa, through to Nigeria. Studies in Ivory Coast building in Senegal, Ghana, just these are some of the countries that we’re working in at the moment. And so the teams have built up and I’ve wanted to build slowly, but we have now started to become quite significant.

We have over a hundred staff, as I said 

Tim Abrahams: That must be one of the largest practices that… one of the largest practices in the area. 

David Adjaye: Without a doubt it’s the largest practice in West Africa. And it’s probably on par to becoming probably the largest practice in the continent I think. I don’t know of a practice that big on the continent, so I don’t want to say, ’cause I haven’t done 

Tim Abrahams: South Africa.

David Adjaye: I thought so. But apparently not that big. 

Tim Abrahams: Some practice building the administrative capital in Cairo. It’s pretty engineer heavy. 

David Adjaye: very engineer heavy and it’s usually foreign firms that come in and do those.

Tim Abrahams: Of course.

David Adjaye: So in terms of, in, a locally based African studio, we think we are, but that’s not, I’m not really interested in that. But what is more interesting, for me, the scale is not something I’m interested in boasting about. Only what I’m boasting about is the idea that, what I realized when I got to West Africa is there’s a huge generation of talent that are just, can’t get visas, can’t go to the west, so they can’t do the sort of brain drain thing. I call it brain draining. But they can’t do that. They’re stuck, but there isn’t enough work for them to do. Everybody’s building a building, but it’s mostly contractors building whatever. And architects are barely used because there’s a misunderstanding of what value an architect brings.

And so they are stuck in this in-between space. And what we wanted to do with the office was to demonstrate that we had global capacity, locally rooted. And could take on the projects that would traditionally go to Western firms because of the lack of expertise on the ground, and that we would absolutely be training a generation of architects with the real skills that they need to go start their own studios and flourish.

When I, in London and New York, I wanted boutique, much more focused firms. That was much more of interest for me. We only expanded when we needed to ’cause we had buildings that we’re building and we needed to do it. Whereas in West Africa, I’m very interested in. In being a kind of, almost like an academy.

So we’re training generations and I’m really comfortable, there’s already several offices that are coming out of my office that people are hearing about and they’re already getting press and the people know they’ve come through my studio 

Tim Abrahams: Do you wanna name check any? 

David Adjaye: There’s Worofila, there’s Glenn DeRoche, these are all offices that are coming out of.

Adjaye Associates, they would not exist without Adjaye Associates sort of being the incubating bed for them. And there are others coming. I know that there are other firms. We also sponsor and are supporting young firms. So there’s a young practice that I’m very.

Very excited about what they could do, and we’re supporting them with building their infrastructure, teaching them how to run businesses. It’s an office slash academy. I see it. So I stopped teaching in the world, but in a way I’ve decided I will teach in Ghana through the studio.

But also, I’ve also been talking to KNUST, the university, which has been training more or less the generation of architects for the last few decades. a fantastic university, which is a science, a technical university that was. Made by Kwame Nkrumah, the independence, pioneering figure. .

And. I want to create a relationship with the university formally where we are symbiotically, supporting and creating a studio.

We’re working with them on their accreditations and just upgrading what they’re doing. There’s an exciting new dean who’s very engaged with us and we think we can do something very special. This idea of. Giving, because we have a lot of work in, in, in Ghana and West Africa and Africa.

We’re able to train people. You know what I say to teams that train you, if you want to stay, we love and we want to carry on. If you are. Wanting to set up on your own and we, you do it the right way. We are very happy to support you to create a network because we need more architects.

Tim Abrahams (2): It’s interesting because one of the aspects of, if you say, if you compare to what happened in the Middle East in the 1970s 1980s and going forward where as wealth and political stability arrived, they were able to bring in architects from abroad to build prestige projects.

And that process continued under the 21st century. Whereas what’s happening in West Africa is that obviously you are a global architect, but with Ghanaian roots who have come into that. So it’s, you’ve got an opportunity there to, for things not to feel helicoptered in

David Adjaye: I hope so. You’ve actually understood exactly the speed and the urgency of why I am doing it.

The idea is to hopefully build a network of capable architects who have the skills of being able to deliver at many scales, so that as the economies get stronger, that work can go to those communities so that we can build from within rather than doing a sort of. Get the Western architects in, learn from them, and then build your team, which is what Asia did and what the Middle East is now doing.

I hope you know. That, that can happen. It’s really one of my big desires. 

Tim Abrahams: The Cathedral project, ’cause I mentioned that to you before. I’m expecting you to say how that’s, 

David Adjaye: no, it’s not dead. 

Tim Abrahams: It lives

David Adjaye: No, it’s funny. I keep thinking, okay, this administration might just wanna trash it, but I think there was a lot of misunderstanding

Because the process was private in a way. It was government, but it was private. So I think there’s a sense with this administration of really understanding what is going on. It may not be their priority, but it is definitely a national project. Love or hate it. There’s something about this project, which activates a sense of urgency.

About the infrastructure that’s required. So we know that this administration is careful. Making sure that they have done their forensic examination of this so that they can say whether they think it’s, there are bad practices or good practices. So far it has passed its tests, but you know that we know that they’re still carrying on with forensic testing.

But in the meantime, it’s on pause. It’s just on pause. 

Tim Abrahams: It’s not as if it’s a straightforward cathedral project.

David Adjaye: What’s really funny to me is that we called it the Cathedral project, but I was surprised when people really thought that, why is David doing a cathedral?

If you know anything about what I do and how I work, typologies are opportunities to understand and frame. The 21st century through the lens of the past, but also a way to bring the future into the present. Bring future ideas into the present. So the Cathedral is really a cultural infrastructure.

This is a country which is very much spiritually still, focused. So we’ve used that as the platform to create an event center, a gathering space for the nation. Community gardens. There hasn’t been a garden since Nkrumah made independence. New sort of 15 acre gardens, a couple of acres.

It’s a 15 acres site, few acres of garden space in front of it for the community, but then to create museums. School teaching. So it’s a school of music teaching the first theological library of African Christianity. Everybody says, Christianity is a colonial religion. It isn’t actually.

It’s a global religion and it has its roots that come through that. And yes, they were missionaries, but Christianity also had different intersections into the country and people just don’t know that. Museums, libraries, archives, teaching. A part of what this entire infrastructure is. It’s for me and also activating art, in the body of the commission, is a diagram to commission.

We’ve got about 35 West African diaspora and local artists who were commissioned to work across the entire project. So for me it was also a museum. It was a museum of the present. So the idea was that this is an opportunity for a country where maybe we don’t have the capacity to build 20 different projects to build a, what I call a kind of condenser that opens the opportunity to citizens to see what.

These opportunities could do and where we could, you don’t know what you don’t know until you see it.

Tim Abrahams: There’s not a single, Christianity is multiform

David Adjaye: plural in the most, most beautiful way for me. So there is Ghanaian Christianity, which is very different to Nigerian Christianity.

And in that Ghanaian Christianity, there are multiple strands. There’s obviously Catholicism, church of England, those are one set of things. So it is a huge multiplier. I think fractal leaf pattern. Parts that you need to understand. It’s really a cathedral for the dominant religions. It’s not chosen because somebody likes Christians more than Muslims and it’s just for the dominant religion that is in the country. But a platform not to just celebrate religion. But to understand it and then to see the impact that, you know that the sort of edification that can happen from what that thing is, rather than just looking at it and accepting it.

The other thing that happens is that there has been an incredible document that I’ve been privileged to understand, which, and which is one of the reasons why I took on the project, is that people think that general tourism is a, is the revenue that is important to nations .Actually specific tourism, which is to do with religion or events or all these other things are the real incubator generators that regenerate cities add another calendar element.

There’s a reason why, Frieze happens in October. Episodic events that are specifically about certain professions or certain cultural points are the real garlands of the economy that you want. And in West Africa, before art, ’cause it’s new.

The biggest revenue generator is religion. And I laugh at people, there’s like a billion churches. Why do you think you’re a billion churches? It’s the biggest revenue generator. So this is a win-win for the government, and the government understood it. It is not just a cathedral just to go and just worship it is that.

It’s absolutely that, but it’s also a way to consolidate and to concentrate and to elevate something that’s already happening on the ground. In a really profound way. So if you don’t know West Africa, you don’t understand why this building topology is incredibly important. It might not be in the west, you have so many churches, but they were built in a singular way, built, a few hundred years ago, and they served a certain purpose.

Churches. Now, if you go to churches in West Africa, they are universities, there are academies. It’s where people are learning. They’re hybridized. So we are learning from this on the ground hybridization. And consolidated into a national monument, which we believe would be a massive employment and income generator, but also a cultural edifier. And that’s what’s exciting about it.. You wouldn’t see if you just analyzed it from above.

Tim Abrahams: Cathedral’s a great word.

David Adjaye: It’s a great word. ’cause it galvanized, but it’s also. In this moment it backfired, because now they think of it as like, why are we building a religious building?

And we’re like, it’s not just a religious building. 

Tim Abrahams: It is, it is accurate in a kind of, yeah. In. If one were to think of the times when in the, just in the uk when religion was the dominant mode

David Adjaye: Correct.

Tim Abrahams: Of interaction. That’s what cathedrals had that

David Adjaye: power to galvanize people to go to a building that they could never experience in their own town or in their community. It was an edifier and they went, wow. We’ve gotta go regularly ’cause it’s so inspiring. So it’s from that typology, but this is not that we don’t, people have glamorous houses. So it’s not about inspiring people with the architecture.

It’s about inspiring people with a multitude of capacity and possibility and to use the center of Accra as a galvanizing gathering sort of device. So the topology and its history is being hijacked to create. A kind of a moment that has existed and ground tested through the community, but could become a really exciting architectural model.

Tim Abrahams: To, just to talk about the world outside Africa and the, you mentioned, we were just talking off mic as the phrase is about your working patterns. And perhaps you could just tell us a little bit about about, just to give an insight into your working life, how you spend that.

David Adjaye: So I’m now based in Accra. But I have two other studios. I have a New York studio and we’re working in New York, in the car, in the Americas, the Full Americas and the Caribbean is what that studio is, and the London office, which deals with the Middle East and Asia, as well as Europe. So I move. I spend just over two weeks there.

I try to spend over two weeks – I have young children – in Accra every month, and I go to either New York or London. And I alternate unless there’s an emergency, and then obviously I, that’s the diary scrambles. But I’m basically in New York every other month, and I’m in London every other month, and I spend about a week in the studio.

Obviously with technology. I’m in constant dialogue every day, but I’m on the ground doing my meetings and things that I need to do with the teams in that way. So I’m quite pathetic. I’m very mobile, but also, I’m grounded in that I’m based in West Africa.

Yeah. 

Tim Abrahams: And the work that you are doing in these other [places] is… it sounds as if Africa is very exciting and this, it seems like the focus of your energies. Is that the case?

David Adjaye: No, no. I’m, Adjaye Associates is a global office, to use that economic term, it’s a planetary office to use the term that I like to use the geographical term, it’s, I am excited by the privilege of working in communities and in parts of the world that have been underserved.

Or in parts of the world where the emerging typo, typologies and types need to be made. That’s what’s been the grounding idea that there, that for me, I’m, I love capital cities, and that’s great. And any opportunity to work in them. We’re working, we’re finishing the Studio Museum in New York. Bigger than the Whitney, but it’s like the Whitney, it’s like the new Whitney, and it’s so we’re very honored to be able to work in capital cities, but at the same time, we’re working in Mumbai and creating the first ever major, arts complex with with an incredible foundation that’s doing work. And that’s very exciting for us. But, but at the same time, we are also doing MOWAA, which is a ground up starting and rethinking of projects, and for me, the studio’s excellence is in being able to work planetarily, I don’t want to use the global word, so to work in a planetary manner, to learn lessons and practices and to be able to bring them, to cross pollinate them where we need to.

I really see the idea of Global resonance of knowledge as important to specific local situations. 

Tim Abrahams: I’m gonna ask you about this again because it has an implication in what you’re saying, but the news stories from 2023, how has that impacted that ambition?

David Adjaye:  It’s– it caused a reflection moment. What it did was to clarify many issues, but we move on. And, businesses fluctuate there, ups and downs and there it was a kind of sensational moment. The media very much enjoyed it. It scared some clients, but also clients that really believe in us, have been incredibly loyal.

And we move on and we get more, we have more work and we’re working hard. And as you can see. Things are going well, 

Tim Abrahams: I know you as a London architect. When I moved to London, I moved to Whitechapel and one of the buildings that made me feel like I’d moved to the center of the universe in a typical new Londoner way was the Idea Store in Whitechapel. There is a historical moment in the evolution of London. The Dirty House, and you played a key part in that. How has it impacted that and does it, has it made you question that relationship? 

David Adjaye: No, not at all. No, not at all. Not at all. They’re very separate things. They’re very separate things. Adjaye Associates started in London and has now become a global office, planetary office, and its focus has shifted.

We are not part of the market that’s working with the same developers trying to do things again and again. That’s a very different practice to us. We are a much more exploratory research laboratory that’s looking for opportunities to evolve topologies of the 21st century. We move where we need to be.

We’re much more nomadic. We are not a site specific office and we make, I make centers where it makes sense, where we have resonance and where we see opportunity. 

Tim Abrahams: Typologies of the 21st century. What other typologies of the 21st century are you working on?

David Adjaye: You will see, you’ll see. I think this has been an incredible conversation. Thank you so much. And thank you so much.

Tim Abrahams: I dunno what you made of that. And I dunno what most people make of Adjaye’s ongoing relevance as an architect. Are we in a post cancellation environment? I’m not entirely sure. What I do know is that we are working out the implications of some very key decisions that we made in the late 2010s, early 2020s.

James Stewart, Director of the Princeton University Art Museum said in 2018, “I have spent a great deal of time lately thinking about whether and how art museums have operated and might now operate as activist institutions and thus act as agents of change.” James Stewart, director of the Princeton University Art Museum in 2025 said the following, “we have to find a way to separate the work from the maker. How many of these artists would we be able to exhibit if we couldn’t do that?” I think something has changed between those two statements. What is more interesting and arguably historically more important is the story that was alluded to in Leslie Lokko’s, 2023 Venice Biennale. That is the way in which West Africa, a place we were told was something of a basket case is now building healthcare and cultural institutions designed by architects.

It is important, I think, to speak to those involved in that process and think about them. I think it’s also very important to consider the way in which we are treating cultural artifacts and how MOWAA the Museum of West African Art is acting as an agency for allowing that conversation to move forward.

This is why I spoke to David, and I hope it’s why you listened with an open mind. Thank you very much. 

 

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