David Adjaye – författare

The African continent contains some of the world’s most vibrant culture and creativity, and yet its buildings – vernacular, colonial or contemporary – have rarely engaged the interest of Western architects. David Adjaye, the first black architect to establish a truly global reputation in his field, has found endless sources of inspiration for his designs in the rich – and chequered – heritage of Africa’s teeming metropolises. His life dream was to return to the continent as an architect to document Africa’s built environment. Over a long decade, he tirelessly documented these dynamic, colourful cities, photographing thousands of buildings, sites and places, and letting each building speak for itself in telling contrast to a design world obsessed with photorealistic slickness. The result was a stunning seven-volume work that has become an essential resource for all those interested in the burgeoning continent. This compact edition will make the fruits of this once-in-a-generation record available to a much wider audience. The result is one of the most original, ambitious and important architectural publications of our time, now available to everyone wishing to gain an understanding of a unique architectural heritage overlooked for too long.

For many young architects, houses or domestic buildings are among the first projects they design. For David Adjaye, such early commissions were connected to a rising generation of creatives, with whom he shared a range of sensibilities. His artistry, clever use of space and inexpensive, unexpected materials resulted in many innovative and widely published houses, mainly built in London. After twenty years of practice and a raft of high-profile projects around the world – not least the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC, which opened in the autumn of 2016 – houses represent a smaller portion of Adjaye’s work, but are more potent as a result. Selecting projects that are challenging for their sites, complexity or architectural possibility, Adjaye has both expanded and sharpened his domestic design, taking it in new directions. This monograph presents in vivid detail the nine finest and most recent examples, from Ghana to Brooklyn, from desolate farmlands to urban jungles. The results, presented through lucid texts alongside detailed and photographically rich visual documentation, testify to the importance of Adjaye’s growing inventiveness and provide powerful new design ideas for residential architecture.

Constructed Narratives brings together essays and several recently completed buildings by David Adjaye, in the United States and elsewhere. In the essays, Adjaye shows how his approach to the design of temporary pavilions and furniture, private houses, and installations at the 2015 Venice Biennale feeds into his designs for public buildings. Other essays discuss his engagement with geography, the urban environment, his approach to materiality, and architectural types. The presented projects include two public libraries and the National Museum of African American History and Culture, all in Washington D.C., a residential mixed-use building in New York, and a hybrid art-retail building in Beirut. Two of Adjaye's current projects are also included.

David Adjaye, the son of a Tanzanian diplomat, spent his childhood moving between international cities before settling in London, where he was educated. Fresh out of the Royal Academy of Art, his early commissions reflected an influential generation of artists at the turn of the millennium with whom he shared a range of sensibilities. His artistic sensitivity, deft use of space and inexpensive, unexpected materials resulted in a number of iconic projects. With the hindsight of almost twenty years of practice and a raft of high-profile projects around the world – perhaps best symbolized by his National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. – the significance of Adjaye’s earlier projects is clear. Never shying away from a challenge, Adjaye used his first projects as testbeds for what would become his unique, acclaimed and highly sought after brand of ‘critical regionalism’. This monograph presents the first projects of Adjaye’s corpus, many little documented. From London’s West End to Brooklyn, clever urban interventions and pavilions to private houses for artists and public buildings for the many. These early projects, brought together and presented with new analyses and recently uncovered archival material, testify to the originality of an architect at the height of his talents who is changing the face of our built world.