'Trying to look at architecture differently'.

DAVID ADJAYE is recognized as one of the leading British architects of his generation. His innovative and engaging designs emphasize the experience of architecture within an urban environment Born in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, to Ghanaian parents, he was educated in Africa before moving to London, where he now lives and works. Since receiving his MA in Architecture at Royal College of Art in 1993, he has built a reputation as a visionary architect with an artistic sense for using materials and showcasing lighting, winning a number of prestigious commissions and prizes. In 2000, he reformed his studio as Adjaye/Associates. A role model for young people, Mr. Adjaye lectures frequently at universities worldwide. He has co-presented for BBC "Dreamspaces", a television series on modern architecture, and hosted a radio programme featuring interviews with leading architects. He has recently published two books on his work: Houses: Recycling Reconfiguring Rebuilding (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2005) and Making Public Buildings: Specificity Customization Imbrication (London: Whitechapel, 2006). The exhibition, "Making Public Buildings", a mid-career retrospective of Adjaye's public projects, opened at the Whitechapel Art Gallery of London in January 2006 and will travel to a number of cities around the world.

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Mr. Adjaye spoke with Horst Rutsch of the UN Chronicle in June 2006.

HORST RUTSCH: "Making Public Buildings", the mid-career restrospective of your work, seems to point, not only to a method, but also towards a purpose. Three concepts come to mind: multiplicity, accessibility and engagement. How do you respond to these challenges?

DAVID ADJAYE: These concepts can be found in architecture, as well as in the social sciences and global discussions. I was trying to look at architecture differently, through another lens than the one it's usually looked at. In my work, I am trying to speak to this other so-called informal agenda that operates. This has come from me--I was born in Africa, I lived in Africa, but I was educated in Europe--and in my own time I've started to rediscover Africa for myself, without my parents. I think that my heritage has had a profound effect on my way of seeing.

I was very much struck by the notion of the informal as it relates to architecture. Are there lessons to be learned from the production of ordinary folk, as they make the things that become their built environment and, in turn, affect them? It became really clear that, in the absence of the high patron with vast amounts of money, architecture in its traditional sense obviously doesn't exist in these communities, but architecture as a living art does. The meaning of habitation--and the way in which habitation is made and appropriated, exhibiting a play, even at the softest levels, in terms of aesthetics--is incredibly powerful.

When I started working as an architect in London, I decided that I was not going to work immediately for multinational commercial developers. I didn't want to move straight into that world of stone joints, window mullions and selecting panels. Instead, what was incredibly interesting to me was exploring this notion of engagement and of whatever the public might be. I didn't want to work from that patronizing position of claiming to represent the public. Instead, I wanted to really question the purpose of architecture--especially in the European context, where it became so difficult to even use certain words anymore when describing architecture--namely how one posits the notion of pulling together the assembly of things to have any kind of meaning to a particular community or group.

I'm not necessarily saying that this has meaning to these groups. What I mean is that my strategy is an attempt to bring down certain tendencies and bring up certain ignored positions--a rebalancing--in the hope that there's an equilibrium that allows for an accessibility to occur which is not so simplistic. It's not about handrails or ramps, and not about patronizing, but about a melting of hierarchies of knowledge. This allows people who've never encountered a piece of architecture to still understand that something is going on, that something maybe relates to them specifically in the world. So this notion of imbrication is very important for me. In my work, something I've pursued very deliberately is this notion of "not far away, but closer and closer still"--so close, in fact, that it's difficult to notice it as an object. It is about trying to move architecture to the point where it acts almost like a cloth, acts as a device, which moves seamlessly from the body to the building.

It just struck me that in trying to rediscover any social agenda within architecture, its collective agenda, there has to be a new kind of engagement. The sixties were brilliant; it was about an attempt, inspired by the ideals of the Enlightenment, to engage with this notion of the social, but done in an objectifying way. And I think for that reason it had huge failings because, in objectifying the social so much, it lost its rhyming potential with how society moves and operates, vibrates and resonates. We don't have the capacity to understand that in an empirical way and translate it. We don't say, "People migrate in a group like this, so then we make buildings like this", or "People do this, so we build like this"--that's the desire of the social scientist-architect, trying to engineer a better world.

HR: You've helped to popularize architecture through the BBC. This has given you the possibility to select architects like Oscar Neimeyer and Charles Correa to discuss concepts and explore ideas about architecture that are close to your own. Both Neimeyer, in Brazil, and Correa, in India, were innovative in monumental as well as residential architecture. (1) Then there's also that element of urban planning that comes into play, the way the problem of urbanization plays out in their work.

DA: Yes, that's what it was all about. First, on the idea of research in public. For me, there are two ways of operating: discovery can work in that hermetic, science-like way, conducting experiments in the laboratory and finding an opening. But I was more interested in an older model, where the investigation of knowledge is a public affair. I felt that this was incredibly important because my exploration was about an engagement with the world. It was not about my own intimate scenarios but about architecture in an expanded field. And to understand those ideas, I felt that it was important that the research guiding some of those ideas also had to have some currency within this larger universe. These ideas do have currency within the specialized realm of architecture, but it struck me, when I was approached by the BBC, that this was a unique opportunity: to use language and a certain visual syntax, a visual narrative, to try to disseminate the experiments that have occurred and which lay the ground for a kind of critical engagement again. I wanted to show that there was a serious precedent for this kind of engagement, which had formal ramifications, good or bad, but which have long passed.

So it was really important for me to meet Oscar and to meet Charles Correa--right now, I'm trying to arrange to meet Pancho (Amancio) Guedes to ask him about what he did in Mozambique (2)--because I was trying to understand what the scenario was on their minds; to grasp how they saw these transitions. I am fascinated by the fact that they were "cuspian" characters on the notion of rural life, which then suddenly becomes highly urbanized in a very short amount of time. What was interesting to me was the notion of the architect's engagement within this system: the idea that the architect plays an important role in the shaping of the image of a nation in its formative years; and what that does to how a nation develops. It was about an invention, a kind of super-invention, that was required in order to create those cultural symbols for the new nation.

HR: There's a utopian moment to it.

DA: A very utopian moment. A heroic moment. Almost one of the last heroic moments, really. I'm fascinated by that almost naive heroism because it implies a certain risk, past its empirical readings. Sometimes it reaches for something that is beyond the control of the architect or the client. That fascinated me: that architecture could push to a point that was not necessarily known beforehand. I found that in both cases, Neimeyer and Correa had the same insight. Reflecting on their work in later life, they both realized that the thing that came out of it was actually much more significant than the individual projects they were doing and which they thought were important at the time.

So exploring these questions, and doing it in public, seemed like the right way to do it. It was an attempt to not be hermetic about it: establishing the groundwork for my own work, but sharing it at the same time. It wasn't about "Oh, I've discovered something; I'm just going to give it to you". And architecture does this. I think a lot of my posturing and my strategies come from a desire to counter that hermetic nature of architecture because, ultimately, it's not as sophisticated as the subject wants it to be. There can be a more critical engagement with the notion of whatever the public is. Engagement with people is critical. I think that people can go further, once they're engaged in this subject; they can dream further than architects do.

HR: This brings us to another part of your investigations: your rediscovery of Africa, and your idea that slums or informal settlements aren't indicators of crisis anymore, but evidence of resilience and creativity in adaptation.

DA: I always say to my students when we look at these informal settlements from around the world, "You look at them and think it's about poverty, about lack of adequate materials, lack of sanitation, etc. Yes, it's about all that. But it's also about an extraordinary inventiveness and an extraordinary density that an empirically trained architect is not even capable of conceiving." It's about a certain attitude, which can do certain things. It's about a set of scenarios and relationships--and subtle details, which mark, encode and transform a place that you think looks like nothing into a very specific terrain for a very dense group of people. What are not set up in these informal settlements are traditional scenarios of access to water, sanitation, etc. This has to do with financial power. But looking beyond that we gain insight into the ability of human beings to manage complex situations in a very nuanced and sophisticated way. It's a very difficult area--I'm not trying to glamourize it, either--but I'm interested in slums because I think something very specific happens in this informal world, which is powerful and that needs better understanding.

HR: There's also a certain function to them that people tend to forget or neglect. Slums are basically the line of demarcation between the rural and the urban. They are the first point of entry for those coming from rural areas into the city. These informal settlements need to be better integrated into the urban fabric.

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DA: It's almost like a caravanserai. It is a very much required transitional junction between the city and the rural life. The jump to the city is an extreme experience for people from rural communities. Yes, that's a very interesting way of looking at it. It's very much an intensification of the urbanization process. It's a gate, a nodal point, a threshold, really, before starting to engage in the city proper. And as such, slums perform a very important role, recalibrating a person from one world to another. That's a huge typological investigation on the urban environment--how a city is made and what it does. And architects are not up to speed with that, nor are planners. We negatively see slums as an ill, a cancer that needs to be cut away or burnt off.

HR: When fitting public buildings into the urban landscape, there's a whole network of elements that comes into play. Your response to those challenges is exemplified by your Idea Stores. You try to integrate them into a preexisting urban fabric and also attempt to change that environment--reaching out to the local community.

DA: Architectural change for me is not interesting when it just operates in the realm of aesthetics, when it operates as change simply through the sensational. Architectural change for me is about acquiring a certain kind of looseness--contingency is a really good word--an ability to adapt and respond very directly to the urban environment. This is really tough for an architect, because an architect wants to make a unit, which stands alone and can be placed very neatly into this matrix board of the city.

HR: Dropped in.

DA: Dropped in--"Bang! Beautiful! Look at that! Next!" (laughs) I think that this is deeply problematic. The evolution of municipal architecture is its ability to understand that urban landscape. And that landscape being more diaphanous--much more porous, much more layered, much more dissolved, much less clear--is, I think, the power of it. When architecture responds directly to that, then it starts to operate on a really terrific level of resonance across its immediate locale and also outside of it.

Doing the first Idea Store, I tried to develop the notion of inhabiting a place that was essentially a no-go zone. It was necessary for me to re-picture the building, not by making it picturesque, but by creating a space that enables the incorporation of programmes in such a way that it doesn't just beautify, but isn't cynical or patronizing, either. When I did the Idea Store on Chrisp Street--a long, horizontal sixty-metre building--the shop owners underneath were like, "You can't put this here! This is what you put in the City!" You know, this very East End attitude, "Oh, here we go, the powers that be are coming to clean us up". I made it clear that I wanted to make an architecture that is at once incredibly fragile and open to its context, but is not patronizing to the local community. I could have made this little sweet building, but instead I literally spread the building along this no-go zone as much as possible, to the point where it neutralized the entire thing, and it has now turned that plane into a completely new public space--an interiorized public space, no doubt.

For me, the notion of interiorized public space is not about atriums. I find this deeply manipulative, deeply non-public; it becomes a space of observation, a space of representation. What I mean by public space, when I say a building becomes public space, is that the building re-enacts the confidence of the users into feeling that this is a space for them on their own terms, whatever that may be. It's about re-empowering the users within a public building, so that they no longer feel as though they are just part of some system, but believe they can actually take it over and do what they wish to do.

I remember an architectural photographer, a friend of mine, saying, "Do you even like the fact that they put these posters up and they're putting these things around?" And I said, "No, no, if you look at the way I drew these plans, it's about them inhabiting it. It doesn't weaken my building." My building is not a representation of aesthetics. It's a kind of container, I hope, an emotional container for life to exist--for multiple lives to exist, preferably--and for them not to feel any hierarchy within that. If I can achieve that, I feel I have succeeded.

HR: So even though a public building inescapably has an official function, tied to an institution, the people for whom it's actually meant are less interested in its function than in its usefulness. And this is the question about your standard for success, meaning if it's used, then it's successful.

DA: It's no longer about the empirical satisfaction of what you think is required and thinking that through. For me, the success is definitely not in the programmatic content, but in the use of the architecture by the public--in what I call the porosity of the use, the multiplicity of the use; the ability for it to be expanded in many different ways. Ultimately, if the use is high--even if the programme content is lacking--then the building still succeeds, because it allows for the invention of a new scenography within the public mind, about what they need and what they want.

In the Idea Stores, the rooms were set up in such a way that they could be collapsed as well. It's interesting how it became very clear to the community that they could use them as flexible halls, as informal gathering spaces. Nothing is fixed, so you can freely reconfigure the space. The only things that are fixed are the views out of the building. There are moments where the building becomes a camera obscura to the urban landscape. You're forced to look at the landscape. Sometimes it's very harsh; I deliberately put windows overlooking brick parting walls, but at levels that allowed people to see them in ways that they hadn't, looking at people's roofs or how a train line cuts through the city. These views became the bucolic elements--not in the traditional sense of beauty, but rather the idea of trying to encourage engagement with the urban landscape beyond the arm's length of the day-to-day that most people are engaged in.

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HR: The recently opened Nobel Peace Centre is perhaps, to date, your most well-known work. Here, the challenge is representing a globally recognized institution. Architecture is no longer only local, but ties into what these global networks can do.

DA: What was interesting about the Nobel project was that we were selected, I think, because of our collaboration with artists, our work with certain makers, where we were very interested in creating highly specialized scenography structures that conveyed specific messages about the work and the way that work was perceived or viewed. I think that's what attracted the Nobel Foundation to us principally. It was something they felt was completely different to the generation of architects they were looking at.

Then I hit the reality of their project, namely that we had this landmark railway station to deal with, this notion of a local memory--the railway station in Oslo is synonymous with the old Norway, the war, the bombing of the city, people running to the station, going to the countryside. The idea of a local memory with this difficult global idea was a big trauma to me. How do you start to have any dialogue which can go past the sentimentality of the building, but not destroy it? How do you start to talk about this set of networks and ideas and relationships and non-hierarchical scenarios between nations? The building was fascinating to me. I decided to go back to the experiential--the experiential is a driving agenda in all my work--to take the notion of the experiencing of networks, the experiencing of global systems, the experiencing of relationships, of closeness or "farness"--distance--as a series of physical constructions, both digital and sculptural. These then became the tools that I wanted to use to describe those stories. You could do them all in one object, or you could, like a chemist, dissolve them, and see them shift from one spectrum to the other--literally from the idea of the application of paint right through to the making of an object. And from those two extremes, the notion of technology bringing distant things very close to you in a sensorial way became the mode of exploration. It became a way of talking about the inter-connectedness and "closeness" of things in the world now.

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Although you're in Norway and in the North, and it might seem like you're in the middle of nowhere, you are connected very directly to a kid in Kinshasa or to somebody in Ecuador by the communication networks and systems that exist and by the exchange of knowledge that is happening all the time, even if it is sometimes invisible to the man on the street. It was really interesting to see, after the Nobel Peace Centre opened, how people instinctively know this, without realizing it--there isn't any physical manifestation of it in any way. I suddenly realized that the success of the place wasn't necessarily in my skillful deployment of certain architectural details or sharp lines, but in the experience for the people. They could suddenly see, in a plain-faced way, this world of virtual information, which they intuitively sensed existed but never had a chance to see in a holistic way. They could experience that global idea through all their senses--through their eyes, their touch, their smell, their spatial coordination, etc. It was quite an intense experience for me to witness that.

HR: Coming back to a more local setting, two of your buildings in London address the political significance of your work very directly, namely the Stephen Lawrence Centre and the Bernie Grant Centre. They have different histories but they're evidently related, and they're very important for you in your work as an architect--specifically being an architect based in London, having grown up in London after years of travel with your family. So if we have, with the two Idea Stores, the notion of democracy--where the success of a building is determined, not by its public function, but by its public use--then we have with the two other buildings the notion of civil society, which is the foundation of a functioning democracy. And these two buildings very clearly signify what role civil society plays within the public realm.

DA: Absolutely. When those two competitions were announced I went after them with a vengeance. There was a political crack that made those two projects possible--a very small crack which closed very quickly after them. What can usually happen in those political scenarios, where there is a trauma and then a potential outpouring of the public, is a requirement to have some synthesis. If something doesn't occur, it can die very quickly and then it heals and moves on. But these were moments where a very wonderful translation occurred. It wasn't just about mourning but about wanting to learn from that experience; to use that moment as a social emblem to make a remembrance point to move forward. This notion of the remembrance point, of it not just being what I call a "begging bowl" scenario--meaning, "Oh yeah, that's what they did to those people"--became very, very important to me. That, for me, was the moment where architecture, through its political positioning, could create a socially correcting scenario. These projects could retranslate that moment into something that starts to actively represent how the public, how civil society, can make good things that benefit everybody, and also act as new kinds of monuments within the landscape.

Neither project is patronizing; they're not just about what people are doing, but, really, what people want to do. They're implicitly about the notion of communication and of learning and growing--essentially the seeds of all of those. But they're played through the figure of the nonprofit institution and the notion of theatre--theatre being the great critical lens through which the public becomes aware of itself and the non-profit being the agency that calibrates against the profit-making machine. These are two very important components which work within the notion of civil society, the civic realm.

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Coming from black British culture, I felt the dilemma of the black British experience in England, which has always suffered very much from being dependent on the State. Unlike the Asian experience or the Chinese experience, which quickly became emancipated and financially powerful, and could create its own monuments, black British experience--and I mean specifically the Afro-Caribbean experience--was completely switched off, couldn't quite grab the opportunity, couldn't quite make its own path.

They remained totally voiceless and powerless. And the criticism is that three generations later, in people's heads, it became a "begging bowl" scenario with the State, where they're not empowered, but neither are they poor. So they're stuck in this middle ground--a sort of ghetto scenography occurs, where there's a sense, "We don't belong--but, actually, we do, because we've been here...." For me, this is a real oversimplification of the black British experience and of the complexity of that history. And so this moment of using architecture to reshape and shift that image becomes really important. Architecture can certainly be used to transfigure that notion; it can be transfigured, literally, through architecture.

When these public buildings become elements of the city, components of the city--with use--it's no longer viewed as charity; it takes on the notion of contribution. It no longer remains ideas, words; it becomes actions, things. So to shape the image of these actions, to make this new image of what black Britain is within the community, was hugely important for me. This was something that can happen only until the black community has its own power to make its own monuments. And it was a really important moment for twenty-first century Britain to have these images: firstly, as a reflector for the community to look at itself; and secondly, for the larger community, which looks at this other community, as a way of having a much better relationship or understanding of what these people contribute--how they are very much part of the civic fabric and contribute positively to it and also to the sophistication of England in becoming a global country.

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A lot of people were scared about these being political projects. But I clearly saw that these two projects, whether they were seen as political projects or not, had much bigger ramifications, in terms of civil society, than even the political parties or organizations that were setting them up realized. I thought that the architecture had to play a very clear role. Before I met the Stephen Lawrence Trust, they were happy to have a Georgian building. I moved them to this scenario where they had this incredible site that the city council gave them, and we were building these double pavilions for them. In a way, it's impossible to make a monument to Stephen like a sculpture or a statue; it's deeply troubling. It's almost what the South African Truth Commission does in that it re-images the wounds for you, and it becomes a really difficult idea of social repair and growth. When architecture assumes the notion of the monument and spectacle into itself, and then dissolves that notion into programme and use, you get both. You get monument on a grand scale and visionary programme at the same time.

HR: You transfigure something from a heritage that is negative--racism--into an emblem of hope, where diversity is the key term. And from two different angles--Stephen Lawrence being a victim of racism and Bernie Lawrence being a fighter against racism.

DA: Yes. Absolutely.

HR: As a public figure, you've taken on dimensions that weren't initially part of your project as an architect, and now you're working on the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver. (3) Where do you see this going? How do you want to develop this further?

DA: (laughs) That question catches me right in the middle of the thinking that I'm doing right now. I've always understood that the work in the White chapel show was, for me, my transitional moment, to get to where we are now. The work I'm doing right now still encompasses all those notions and questions we've discussed, but at a scale that that is five and ten times greater than those initial projects. And, in a way, the ambition for me now is to translate, in a very seamless way, the conditionality that I've been exploring, this loaded agenda, into this new scale of projects.

What was interesting was that there was an agency in all these mid-level projects, an incredible agency that allowed them to come together. I now feel I have the opportunity to allow that to happen in the cathartic way in which architecture is made. The reason why this is important to me is because I feel it is the completion of the exercise. It demonstrates the ability to use that critical position in a relevant and useful way within the mainstream. The ability to operate within the mainstream of the business and not lose that intellectual capacity is the goal for me. And, in doing that, I think it sets out a blueprint for engagement.

If I don't manage to do it, fine, but I want to prove that it is possible to do at a larger scale. In fact, the scale that I'm working in now is the real scale of architecture: massive developments which occur, invisible to most people, but which hugely affect people's lives, and that we just take for granted. That's really where the real fun begins; the pavilion and the form are very important, but they are the exercises that show whether one can actually transform infrastructure on a massive scale.

It's finally brought me to a position where I'm extremely interested in Africa again, in a very new way. I think, for me, this is the completion of the exercise. And so, although I've been offered many commercial jobs, I'm not rushing into anything; I'm not really interested in engaging in that very obvious way--building a tower block or skyscraper in Africa. My intuition is that these things that I was looking at have a powerful resonance and are important to the making of the city--my testing ground was Europe to begin with--namely, to fuse the rational, as you call it, with the experiential, emotional, irrational agenda. How do you then work when you have to go back the other way? It's not acceptable to me to go into this kind of condition and say, "This is disorder, and we must have order!" It's about trying to discover another possibility that can exist, one which can work off the notion of the formal, but be absolutely inspired by the informal--and to have an equivalent power and resonance within a community. This, for me, is the test, really.

(1) OSCAR NEIMEYER, a Brazilian architect born in 1907, is most famous for his architectural designs for the city of Brasilia.

CHARLES CORREA, an Indian architect born in 1930, designed many structures around India, including a memorial to Mahatma Gandhi in Ahmedabad.

(2) AMANCIO (PANCHO) GUEDES, a Portuguese architect born in 1925, has created over 500 designs in Portugal and several countries in Africa, in particular in Mozambique.

(3) The new home of the MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART|DENVER in Denver, Colorado, is David Adjaye's first commission for a museum worldwide and his first public building in the United States. It is scheduled to open in early 2007.