The highly anticipated 130 William, Adjaye Associates’ first residential high-rise scheme in New York, has just announced its completion. The project, which spans 66 storeys and features distinctive, hand-cast skin, dark colour tones and a grid of arches, is set to define its Lower Manhattan neighbourhood, and the overall city skyline, through its confidence and unique take on high-rise and minimalist architecture. Following hot on the heels of the launch of the Abrahamic Family House in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, also by Adjaye, the project marks 'a new benchmark for luxury living', said Scott J Avram, developer Lightstone’s senior vice president. 

130 William by Adjaye Associates

Led by real estate company Lightstone, 130 William is a holistic vision by the studio's founder, David Adjaye, who conceived both the overall building architecture and its luxurious interiors. The spaces -– 242 residences, which are now more than 90 per cent sold and occupied – are accompanied by outdoor terraces, as well as a new public plaza on the ground level. Meanwhile, some 20,000 sq ft of amenities for residents bring added value to the living experience at 130 William. 

'I am deeply excited to celebrate the realisation of the public plaza park and officially mark the completion of 130 William. Conceived as an urban living room, the plaza is fundamental to how one experiences the building. The plaza creates both a public amenity and a transitional moment between the bustle of the city and the respite of the private residences inside. With its allée of trees, seating, and thematic continuation of the large-scaled arches, the public plaza park is really a gesture to the city and a critical facet of what makes this building unique,' said Adjaye.

The residences in 130 William span from studios to four-bedroom apartments. Luxurious finishes, such as metal detailing and wide-plank white oak flooring, match the exterior's textured masonry facade with delicate bronze detailing. Large openings bring the outside in at every turn – making this building 'quintessentially New York', as Avram described it. 

Hill West served as the executive architect on 130 William. 

130william.com 

adjaye.com 

The Venice Architecture Biennale 2023 is now open to the public. Its rich offerings around this year's theme, 'The Laboratory of the Future’, cater to a wide range of topics to be unpicked – as it should - promising exciting debate, spearheaded by this year's curator Lesley Lokko.

Contributors come from across the globe, a mix of established names and emerging studios - from David Adjaye and Francis Kéré, to Dream the Combine and Cave_bureau. A total of 89 contributors form the main show (and over half of them are from Africa or the African Diaspora), which is divided into six sections - all of which having impressively obtained a sustainability credential, flagging the importance of rethinking the festival model towards a more environmentally friendly future. At the same time, and for the first time ever, the events will include the Biennale College Architettura, which is yet to run (it will be on from 25 June to 22 July 2023). During that, fifteen renowned international tutors - such as Marina Otero, Nana Biamah-Ofosu, Sarah de Villiers and Manijeh Verghese - will work with fifty students, early career practitioners and academics from around the world during a four-week teaching programme. 

Meanwhile, Nigerian artist, designer and architect Demas Nwoko has been presented with the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement of the 18th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia.

Lokko sees the 18th iteration of what is probably the grandest festival of the built environment in the world, as 'an agent of change.' 'In architecture particularly, the dominant voice has historically been a singular, exclusive voice, whose reach and power ignores huge swathes of humanity — financially, creatively, conceptually — as though we have been listening and speaking in one tongue only,' she says. 'The ‘story’ of architecture is therefore incomplete. Not wrong, but incomplete. It is in this context particularly that exhibitions matter.'

At the same time, spread across the Giardini park, the Arsenale grounds and several other locations in Venice, a wealth of national responses from different countries, as well as various collateral events, are set to offer a rich backdrop for more, deep architectural conversation. The world's biggest architecture festival has kicked off – opening to the public today, 20 May 2023, and running through to Sunday 26 November 2023.

Venice Architecture Biennale 2023: the main exhibition

Curated by Lokko, the Venice Architecture Biennale 2023 main exhibition theme, titled 'The Laboratory of the Future’, puts Africa in the spotlight. ‘Africa is the laboratory of the future,’ Lokko said during the Venice Biennale press conference in May 2022. ‘We are the continent with the world’s youngest population, the fastest urbanisation, growing at a rate of four per cent per year, often at the expense of local ecosystems – so we are at the forefront of climate change, too. Yes, the show will focus on Africa, but we are not only talking about Africa – we use it as a place in order to try and understand everything everywhere. After all, the Biennale itself is a workshop for the future.’ 

The architect and academic, who is in the process of setting up the brand new African Futures Institute in Accra, a new architecture research institute and school in Ghana, drew on her extensive research and address book to discuss important, timely issues of diversity and inclusion in architecture, the role of African culture and power in the world – and beyond.  

The full list of participants at the main show includes Adjaye Associates; atelier masōmī; basis; Cave_bureau; Hood Design Studio; Ibrahim Mahama; Kéré Architecture; Koffi & Diabaté Architectes; MASS design group; Olalekan Jeyifous; SOFTLAB@PSU; Studio Sean Canty; Sumayya Vally and Moad Musbahi; Thandi Loewenson; Theaster Gates Studio; urban american city (urbanAC); AD—WO; AMAA Collaborative Architecture Office For Research And Development; Andrés Jaque / Office for Political Innovation; autonoma; BDR bureau and carton123 architecten; DAAR - Alessandro Petti and Sandi Hilal; David Wengrow and Eyal Weizman with Forensic Architecture and Nebelivka project; Dream the Combine; Dualchas; Estudio A0; Flores & Prats Architects; Gbolade Design Studio; Gloria Cabral and Sammy Baloji with Cécile Fromont; Grandeza Studio; Huda Tayob; Kate Otten Architects; Killing Architects; Le laboratoire d'architecture; Liam Young; Low Design Office; MMA Design Studio; Neri&Hu Design and Research Office; Office 24-7 Architecture and Lemon Pebble Architects; orizzontale; Rahul Mehrotra with Ranjit Hoskote; SCAPE Landscape Architecture; Stephanie Hankey, Michael Uwemedimo and Jordan Weber; Studio Barnes; Suzanne Dhaliwal; Sweet Water Foundation; The Funambulist; Twenty Nine studio; Ursula Biemann; White Arkitekter; Wolff Architects; ZAO/standardarchitecture; Studio of Serge Attukwei Clottey; and Sweet Water Foundation. 

Complementing the main shows, a new Venice Architecture Biennale feature will be launched, titled 'Carnival'. This will include lectures, discussions, film and performances, crucial in drawing in the public and enhancing the dialogue between architecture and the world. 'Conceived as a space of liberation rather than a spectacle or entertainment, Carnival offers a space for communication in which words, views, perspectives, and opinions are traded, heard, analysed, and remembered,' Lokko said at the recent Biennale press conference. Carnival is supported by Rolex, the exclusive partner and official timepiece of the exhibition.

Applied Arts Pavilion Special Project: Tropical Modernism

This special section of the exhibition has returned this year with a focus on modernist architecture and 'the ways in which this distinctive architectural style was initially developed and employed as a tool to support colonial rule before being adapted by West African architects to promote the excitement and possibilities of the period that followed Ghana becoming the first sub-Saharan African country to gain independence in 1957.' The show, titled 'Tropical Modernism: Architecture and Power in West Africa' is curated by Christopher Turner (V&A) with Nana Biamah-Ofosu and Bushra Mohamed (AA). 

'Through close study of the work of the Department of Tropical Studies and its collaboration with KNUST, the V&A’s Venice presentation explores the ways in which Tropical Modernism was adapted by Ghanaian architects to promote Nkrumah’s Pan-African ideals during a transitional moment in which new freedoms were won and a break with the colonial past was articulated through architecture. It considers the power of architecture, both as a means of colonial suppression and a symbol of nascent political freedom, as well as exploring the specific legacy of Tropical Modernism in West Africa,' said Dr Christopher Turner, keeper of art, architecture, photography & design at V&A and the exhibition's lead curator. 

Venice Architecture Biennale 2023: the national pavilions

The Venice Architecture Biennale main show is always framed by the multi-layered responses and the variety of the national participations – some presented in dedicated pavilions in the Giardini park, and others spread across different venues all around Venice, instigating a journey of exploration for visitors (often in more senses than one, as they navigate the city's labyrinthine network of canals and alleys in search of shows). Scroll down for a tour. 

British Pavilion

The British Pavilion is led by a group of creatives – Jayden Ali, Joseph Henry, Meneesha Kellay and Sumitra Upham – focusing on a series of installations by six artists and designers, including a new film and soundscape. 'Dancing Before the Moon,' as the show will be titled, was conceived to promote 'everyday rituals (from growing food and cooking to playing games and dancing) are tools for diasporic communities to establish spaces and present new ways of thinking about architecture and the built environment,' the team explained. The artists, Yussef Agbo-Ola, Mac Collins, Shawanda Corbett, Madhav Kidao and Sandra Poulson, reflect, through their work, on global cultural practices that impact space. 'The British Pavilion at the Biennale Architettura 2023 is a space for rethinking the role that people play in shaping the built environment. It demonstrates the need for architecture to look beyond buildings and economic structures and towards everyday social practices, customs and traditions in order to meaningfully reflect how people use and occupy space,' says Ali. The pavilion has just been awarded Special Mention at the Biennale Architettura 2023 in Venice. 

Uzbekistan Pavilion

The Uzbekistan Pavilion 2023 places heritage at the heart of their contribution to the Venice Architecture Biennale. Its creators take their cues from the festival's overall theme, 'The Laboratory of the Future', as envisioned by curator Lesley Lokko, who imagines the exhibition as ‘a kind of workshop; a laboratory where participants and the audience imagine what the future can hold’. Responding to this, The Art and Culture Development Foundation under the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Uzbekistan (ACDF) in Tashkent appointed French-Moroccan office Studio KO to curate their participation to the 18th iteration of the architecture biennale. The practice's previous involvement in Tashkent saw the transformation of a 1912 diesel station into the future Centre for Contemporary Arts (CCA) - the country's first contemporary art centre. It exemplifies the studio's ability to breathe new life into historic structures while preserving their essence.

Danish Pavilion

The Danish Pavilion, curated by Josephine Michau and in collaboration with landscape architectural firm Schønherr, is titled 'Coastal Imaginaries', and focuses on climate change, and specifically the rising sea levels. Schønherr proposes 'a design for the city which would allow it to better coexist with the rising seawater and rainwater levels that result from climate change, and which pose a significant threat to Copenhagen.' The city, which is often hailed for its quality of living, is one of many parts of the world under threat due to coastal changes. The exhibits aim to highlight this, while offering changes to its landscape infrastructure to help prevent flooding - it includes a mesmerising diorama. 

Korean Pavilion

'2086: Together How?', the Korean representation at Venice Architecture Biennale 2023, asks questions about the impact of the environmental crisis in some fifty years. The show is curated by artistic directors Soik Jung and Kyong Park, and looks into case studies of small communities in South Korea. 'Each community is a case study which utilizes the community leader’s deep knowledge of the place and the architect's spatial analysis to evaluate its current state, and propose site-specific future scenarios leading up to 2086. For instance, in the case of Gunsan, practitioners have explored how to work with abandoned homes and buildings to return the old city’s urban landscape to a more natural state. Moreover, each project is motivated by central concerns of how to cope with decaying urban centers and rural villages due to centuries of uneven capitalist development thinking. As such, these projects are about how the past can be connected with the future, and how localism can reshape globalism,' says Soik Jung. 

Swiss Pavilion

Artist Sander and architecture historian Philipp Ursprung are behind this year's Swiss Pavilion. Their exhibit is titled 'Neighbours' and it is set to highlight 'both the spatial and structural proximity of the Swiss pavilion to its neighbour, the Venezuelan Pavilion, and the professional bond of the two architects: Bruno Giacometti (Swiss pavilion) (1907 – 2012) and Carlo Scarpa (Venezuelan pavilion) (1906 - 1978).'

UAE Pavilion

Curator Faysal Tabbarah examines how arid environments can be rich spaces of productivity and natural welath, in the UAE Pavilion's exhibition, ‘Aridly Abundant'. Tabbarah, who is Associate Dean and Associate Professor of Architecture at the College of Architecture, Art and Design at American University of Sharjah, looks at the architectural possibilities of this particular environment in various parts of the world: 'The overarching question I’m exploring through Aridly Abundant is: What architectural possibilities can emerge when we reimagine arid landscapes as spaces of abundance? The National Pavilion UAE’s exhibition at Biennale Architettura 2023 delves into themes, lessons and questions based on learnings from within the UAE’s arid landscapes that other places around the world facing the threat of aridity and desertification can find of use, including countries across Africa, Asia, and southern Europe such as Italy, Spain, and Greece.'

Estonian Pavilion

Bringing the discussion around architecture back to the context of the home, the Estonian display is curated by Aet Ader, Arvi Anderson and Mari Möldre. Titled 'Home Stage' it will be hosted inside a real life rental apartment -address: Salizada Streta 96, Venice. 'The Estonian pavilion exists in the format of a durational performance, where ordinary domestic duties as well as fictional outbursts, both scripted and non-scripted, all take place in the public eye. One of the performers, Paula Veidenbauma, is intrigued by how issues of invisibility, such as care, aggression, and loneliness, contrast and accelerate in tandem with the vast visibility of real estate, which especially in Venice is driven by hyper-tourism and gentrification, said Möldre. 

Australian Pavilion

This year, the Australian Institute of Architects presents 'Unsettling Queenstown,' zooms in on the namesake settlements found all over the former British Empire. These hubs, investigated in this installation through fragments of real and fictional 'Queenstowns', drawing for instance on the Queenstown of Tasmania, are used to explore ideas of colonialism and resource extraction. The show is curated by Anthony Coupe, Director at Mulloway Studio and Emily Paech, Project Lead Interpretation + Urban Environments at Mulloway Studio, academics Ali Gumillya Baker, Associate Professor at Flinders University and Julian Worrall Professor of Architecture and Head of School of Architecture and Design at the University of Tasmania, and Tasmania-based photographic artist Sarah Rhodes. The team stated: 'The British Imperial hangover is pervasive in every corner of the globe: there is quite literally a Queenstown on every continent, bar Antarctica. Unsettling Queenstown unites decolonial theory and praxis, weaving elements from real places and gleanings from current architectural intelligence in search of ingredients to contribute to Venice’s Laboratory of the Future.' 

Brazilian Pavilion

Co-curators of the Brazilian Pavilion Gabriela de Matos and Paulo Tavares look at notions of decolonisation, national identity, diaspora, indigenous knowledge systems, as well as around Brasília and modernism, while connecting to Lokko's main theme through the vector of the African diaspora. Titled 'Terra', the exhibit draws on the past to compose 'possible futures, focusing on the role of land in shaping our understanding of heritage and identity.' The pavilion is set to feature projects born of Indigenous and Afro-Brazilian knowledge about land and territory, as well as bespoke commissions such as an audio-visual piece by Brazilian filmmaker Juliana Vicente, archival photographs complied by historian Ana Flávia Magalhães Pinto, the ethno-historical map of Brazil by Curt Nimuendajú, and the Brasília Quilombola map.  

German Pavilion

Thinking about the past while planning about the future, the German contribution is titled 'Open for Maintenance – Wegen Umbau geöffnet'. Curated by ARCH+ / SUMMACUMFEMMER / BÜRO JULIANE GREB it focuses on themes of care and maintenance. Maria Eichhorn’s work Relocating a Structure, Germany’s contribution to the Biennale Arte 2022, becomes part of the exhibit as the team this year 'squats and maintains' the pavilion, taking it over in its existing condition. The whole Pavilion becomes a 'found object' as notions of sustainable architecture, circular economy, as well as preservation and repair come into play. 

Polish Pavilion

The Polish Pavilion is filled by the frames of four life-size houses. The project, titled  'Datament', is set to serve as an instigator of conversation around physical and digital, data and real life. The installation was created drawing on works and thoughts of artist Anna Barlik and architect Marcin Strzała, guided by curator Jacek Sosnowski. 

Saudi Arabian Pavilion

The Saudi Pavilion team in Venice Architecture Biennale 2023 is led co-curators Basma Bouzo, Noura Bouzo, Joharah Lou Pabalate, and Cyril Zammit, along with architect AlBara Saimaldahar. Their installation places the country's cultural heritage at its heart, while trying to propose 'innovative solutions that contribute to improving societies.' CEO of the Architecture and Design Commission, Dr. Sumayah Al-Solaiman, said:  'We are proud to be participating at the Venice Architecture Biennale for the second time. Taking part in such events, provides us with a global platform to showcase the Kingdom’s architectural vision with the world. We look forward to engaging with architects and designers from all around the globe to share thoughts, exchange ideas, and learn from different experiences.'

Scottish Pavilion

Commissioned by the Scotland + Venice partnership and curated by the Architecture Fringe, -ism, and /other, 'A Fragile Correspondence,' the title of the Scottish contribution to the biennale, takes place this year at the Arsenale Docks. 'From the forests around Loch Ness, the seashore of the Orkney archipelago, and the industrialised remnants of the Ravenscraig steelworks, the project takes us on a journey through three Scottish landscapes across the Highlands, Islands and Lowlands,' write the curators. 'Through these creative explorations, and by proposing a new lexicon of terms and definitions, the exhibition looks to see the potential in possible futures that sensitively work in correspondence with the land rather than simply upon it.' The displays are arranged into four distinct areas. Visitors are guided through the landscapes of Loch Ness, Orkney, and Ravenscraig before reaching a reading room and project lexicon. 

Singapore Pavilion

The Singapore Pavilion delves into concepts around measurements and impact, in a project led by curators and architects Melvin Tan, Adrian Lai and Wong Ker How. Titled 'WHEN IS ENOUGH, ENOUGH? The Performance of Measurement,' the pavilion ponders on how to measure community interaction, how to evaluate intangible qualities and importantly, 'how much is enough?' Visitor interaction and data collection are to be incorporated into the displays too, as guests are invited to answer six questions, as they walk around the centrepiece: a Values Measurement Machine, 'a spectacular series of analogue plotting machines marking data on five-metre-tall calligraphic scrolls.'

Spanish Pavilion

'Foodscapes', Spain's contribution to the Venice Architecture Biennale 2023, takes a different route. Co-curators and architects Eduardo Castillo-Vinuesa and Manuel Ocaña explore their fascination around their country's agri-architectural context and infrastructure, which they call 'the food engine of Europe.' Sustainability and future planning here is approached through ideas around food and nourishment, as well as feeding our cities and the world. 

Turkish Pavilion

Meanwhile, the Turkish Pavilion proposes a more theoretical path with its display, titled 'Ghost Stories: The Carrier Bag Theory of Architecture.' Curated by Sevince Bayrak and Oral Göktaş, the show takes it cues from Elizabeth Fisher’s Carrier Bag Theory of Evolution, which argues that, 'rather than hunting tools, the first cultural device used by humans was probably a carrier bag, which allowed them to transport the vegetables they gathered.' The team draws parallels between this approach and architecture, proposing the exploration of architecture and abandoned buildings with a view to tell their stories and the truths they reveal. The exhibit is accompanied by a manifesto, as well as a book to delve deeper into the subject. 

US Pavilion

Tizziana Baldenebro and Lauren Leving are curating the USA's national participation, with an exhibition titled 'Everlasting Plastics,' together with Cleveland-based gallery SPACES. The team has brought together artists and designers who look at the impact the ubiquitous material has in our lives and the earth - while 'reframing the overabundance of plastic detritus in our waterways, landfills, and streets as a rich resource.' 'Inherent to art and architecture is the aesthetic and materiality of form. Everlasting Plastics bridges this divide by drawing on the power of looking to serve as an entry point for reconsidering our relationships to material worlds,” said Baldenebro. “As the climate crisis becomes a tangible reality, our daily objects must be agents of change. This exhibition extends SPACES’ commitment to supporting artistic experimentation by bringing together a range of practices that are examining, salvaging, and upending a global calamity.'

Canadian Pavilion

'Not for Sale!' is the exhibition housed at the Canada Pavilion in Venice this year, and it aims to draw attention to issues, challenges and potential surrounding the housing crisis in Canada. Connections - among people, as well as between humans and nature - become a key narrative in the show too. The display has been curated by Architects Against Housing Alienation's (AAHA), a curatorial collective. 

Finnish Pavilion

The Finns are tackling sustainability through a difference lens during this year's show - welcome to an exhibition celebrating Huussi, the Finnish answer to waste management and the portable, bio toilet. The pavilion has been curated by The Dry Collective, a group of architects, designers and artists led by project curator Arja Renell, and the displays aim to highlight the current, unsustainable practices around our water and fertilizer use, in particular when it comes to sanitation. 

Italian Pavilion

Located in the Arsenale, the Italian Pavilion, with a show titled 'Everyone belongs to everyone else,' has been curated by Fosbury Architecture, and focuses on the generation of architects under 40 in the country, who 'grew up and were trained against a backdrop of permanent crisis and who have therefore made collaboration, sharing, and dialogue the basis of all their activities.' 

Luxemburg Pavilion

The national participation of the country of Luxemburg zooms into the potential of celestial bodies, planets and the moon. Titled 'Down to Earth', the presentation, curated by Francelle Cane and Marija Marić, discusses the exploitation of space resources, space mining and the idea of 'moon laboratories.'  A live lab, workshops and film material aims to compose an immersive experience. 

Dutch Pavilion

Commissioned by Aric Chen, creative and artistic director of the Nieuwe Instituut, and curated by Jan Jongert of Superuse Studio, the Dutch Pavilion this year is looking at sustainable futures at a macro scale. To that end, 'Plumbing the System,' as the Pavilion is themed, will present 'The Waterworks of Money,' a series of drawings by architect Carlijn Kingma. What brings everything together is the element of water, as 'road maps' are reimagined as alternative 'flows,' proposing a more socially and ecologically regenerative economy.  

Irish Pavilion

The 'resilience of Irish islander communities' is brought front and centre at the Irish Pavilion in Venice Architecture Biennale 2023. Titled 'In Search of Hy-Brasil,' the exhibition zooms in on the diverse communities, cultures and experiences of Ireland's remote islands. Drawing on the biennale's overall theme 'The Laboratory of the Future,' the project, curated by a team of five architects - Peter Carroll, Peter Cody, Elizabeth Hatz, Mary Laheen and Joseph Mackey - blends landscape and human, language and the natural world. 

Taiwan Collateral Event

Organized by the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts (NTMoFA) under the Ministry of Culture, Taiwan's pavilion, 'Diachronic Apparatuses of Taiwan – Architecture as on-going details within landscape' is curated by the Architectural Department of Tunghai University. In its studies, the team looks into the island's agricultural landscapes, creating an inventory that draws on nature and geography and signals towards a better future. The event is held at the Palazzo delle Prigioni, and the exhibit connects with its location too. The team described: 'Measuring approximately 15 meters in length, it serves to expand and unify different landscape works while blending into the palazzo’s interior on the horizontal plane. The bottom of the table is wrapped in black netting that is commonly seen in Taiwanese greenhouses. The light seeping through the mesh conjures a sense of suspension, seemingly transforming the table into an aircraft carrier housing agricultural landscapes from all over the island, thus echoing Venice’s architectural characteristic as a city propped up by man-made bridges.'

Panama Pavilion

The Republic of Panama and its commissioned curator, Aimée Lam Tunon, are also at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2023. ‘Panama: Stories from beneath the water’ zooms in on three different areas within the former Panama Canal Zone and the impact this had on the existing communities, cultures and nature of the region. 'Since antiquity, the tropics have been widely recognized as a symbol of exotic beauty, dangerous animals, and luxuriant vegetation. Portrayed as a faraway place, with different histories, languages, and cultures, this geographical area represents an amalgamation of qualities that define the fantastic and mysterious nature of reality. Often considered from a western perspective to be a hostile environment to progress, the tropics represent everything that Europe and the United States are not (Lasso, 2019), the antithesis of civilized modernity. The exhibition of the Panamanian Pavilion should provide a counternarrative to this status quo, with Panama as a case study for a future vision of a ‘tropical’ nation, by recovering and connecting its various historical influences,' said Lam Tunon. 

Kosovo Pavilion

Located in the Arsenale, the Republic of Kosovo are entering the Venice Architecture Biennale 2023 with a show presenting work by architects Poliksen Qorri-Dragaj and Hamdi Qorri. Its the fifth time Kosovo is part of the architectural festival, and this year the focus is on the concept of migration, and how it helps form the social fabric and identity of modern day Kosovo - in particular how the act of migrating is not a clear cut, single move process. 'People living in multiple places at the same time, maintaining connections between Hostland and Homeland through communication, transfer of knowledge, information, material and immaterial goods,' the curators write. 

Catalonia in Venice

The Institut Ramon Llull presents the collateral event 'Catalonia in Venice_ Following the Fish.' The exhibition, curated by studio Leve Productora's Daniel Cid, Eva Serrats and Francesc Pla, remains true to the biennale theme and revolves around 'urbanism, work spaces and housing from the perspective of the African diaspora in Catalonia.' The display is on view at the Docks Cantieri Cucchini in San Pietro di Castello 40a. 

Japanese Pavilion

In an interesting twist, the Japanese contribution turns the focus on the country's pavilion itself, which was designed in 1956 by architect Takamasa Yoshizaka. The exhibition titled 'Architecture, a place to be loved,' is curated by a team of architects, the co-founders of studio o+h, Maki Onishi and Yuki Hyakuda, as well as designer Yuma Harada and editor Tomomi Tada, who celebrate the structure within Giardini, and through it the work of Yoshizaka. 'As of early summer 2023, sixty-seven years have passed since the completion of the Japan Pavilion. The pavilion has welcomed many people over the years, and is still standing today. The exhibition we present here this year has the theme of “Architecture, a place to be loved,” and has been carefully crafted and nurtured with a focus on the pavilion, as designed by Takamasa Yoshizaka,' the curators write. 'A place to be loved is made possible when architecture includes its engraved memories and stories, when it embodies the scenery behind it and the activities that took place in and around it. That enables the architecture to take on a broader meaning. For that reason, we start by thinking of the architecture as a 'living creature'.'

Greek Pavilion

In a fascinating exploration of the dams and reservoirs that transform the country, for the Venice Architecture Biennale 2023, the Greek Pavilion is presenting 'Bodies of Water.' The co-curators Costis Paniyiris and Andreas Nikolovgenis worked with an extensive team of architects, designers and students to compose a show that digs deep into water retention, supply and its uses. 'Bodies of Water and all related structures, such as dams and earthworks, constitute public architecture in the Roman or Vitruvian sense. It is a public project of collective emancipation, literally, as providers of essential means of sustenance, and symbolically, as proud distillations of collective toil and concern for progress,' the team writes.

Egypt Pavilion

The national participation from Egypt draws on the power of the Niles, examining the ancient river as a 'laboratory for the future.' The display is curated by Ain-Shams University in Cairo, Faculty of Engineering (Egypt) and Università Mediterranea di Reggio Calabria, dArTe Department of Architecture and Territory (Italy) and aims to produce an immersive experience for the visitors. The projects and case studies included examine new interventions and their relationships and impact between nature, landscapes and cultures in the region. 

Nordic Pavilion

Finland, Norway and Sweden unite forces in their joint Nordic Pavilion to creates a show led by Joar Nango, and the architect and artist's archive of books about issues relevant to Indigenous architecture. For this exhibition, titled 'Girjegumpi: The Sámi Architecture Library,' Nango composes architecture and dialogues together with designers, artists and craftspeople, offering critical space for Indigenous imagination, and in particular in Sápmi – the traditional Sámi territory covering the northern regions of Norway, Sweden, Finland and the Kola Peninsula in Russia. 

Portuguese Pavilion

Fertile Futures, the official Portuguese representation at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2023, revolves around a project curated by Andreia Garcia and deputy curators Ana Neiva and Diogo Aguiar. The presentation highlights the contemporary and critical issue of water resources through a series of seven Portuguese hydrogeographies - all designed to promote environmentally friendly strategies and sustainable architecture. Displays include works around the Tâmega Basin; the International Douro; the Middle Tagus; the Alqueva Dam; the Mira River; the Lagoa das Sete Cidades; and the Madeiran Rivers - all zooming into anthropocentric actions in regards to water, nature and its use. 

South African Pavilion

Three curators head the South African Pavilion, Dr Sechaba Maape, Dr Emmanuel Nkambule and Mr Stephen Steyn, supported by a team made up of 2BLN, Spies Architects and Breinstorm Brand Architects. The exhibit focuses on the grassland in Mpumalanga, east of Johannesburg, and the Bokoni civilization there, themed around the 'architectural representation of existing and speculative social structures,' in an exhibition, titled The Structure of a People. 'We have a key opportunity with this Pavilion to present previously unseen artefacts and thinking that is deeply entrenched in vital Indigenous Knowledge Systems in South Africa – and show how the past can truly be the laboratory of the future and help us to rethink critical issues that we face as a global society,' say Maape, Nkambule and Steyn. 

Uruguay Pavilion

Curators creative studio MAPA+INST and musician, performer, composer and producer Carlos Casacuberta lead the Pavilion of Uruguay this year. Their work, titled 'In Opera: Future Scenarios of a Young Forest Law,' is based on 'the understanding of the Forestry Law as an under construction ecosystemic assemblage, which dialogues with diverse spatiality and territorialities and is capable of outlining possible scenarios towards a Uruguay as a laboratory of wooden futures. The proposal as a whole seeks to establish alliances between disciplines and practices such as music, visual culture and architecture,' the team writes. 

Holly See

Following its critically acclaimed success in past years, the pavilion of the Vatican and Holly See is back, this time displaying its contribution within the Benedictine Monastery buildings and the Abbey gardens on the Island of San Giorgio Maggiore. The objective is 'to recover the sense of the Church as a friend of artists, interested in celebrating and highlighting their achievements with a view to developing a richer dialogue and growth in mutual understanding,' said Cardinal José Tolentino de Mendonça, Commissioner of the Holy See’s Pavilion. The displays celebrate the notion and physical space of the 'garden' through an installation by celebrated Portuguese architecture master Álvaro Siza and a brand new garden design by Studio Albori.  

Austrian Pavilion

Using its position within the Giardini, at the northeastern edge of the gardens, the Austrian Pavilion discusses a rejected proposal for their pavilion to open a bridge towards the adjacent island of Santa Elena making it accessible to the public. The display offers drawings, studies and comments, as well as a scaffolding tower that allows visitors to look over to the other side - beyond the biennale walls. The exhibit, titled 'Partecipazione / Beteiligung' has been curated by AKT collective and Hermann Czech. 

Latvian Pavilion

The pavilion of Latvia, located in the Arsenale halls, looks like a supermarket - yet instead of products, its shelves are filled with AI-produced representations of themes and ideas of past biennales. The display is curated by Uldis Jaunzems-Pētersons, and it was designed by Ernests Cerbulis, Ints Menģelis, Toms Kampars, and Karola Rubene. Fun, colourful and thought-provoking, it offers a tongue-in-cheek moment to the Arsenale sequence - and the visitors can interact with it too, by throwing a ball that knocked over items.  

Mexican Pavilion

The Mexican Pavilion has an interactive element too - in the form of a basketball pitch. Titled 'Utopian Infrastructure: The Peasant Basketball Court,' the exhibition brings to the forefront the country's ever-popular basketball courts, a place for community and where people congregate to play, socialise and relax, making these urban spots critical in placemaking.  

The Venice Architecture Biennale 2023 is on from 20 May to Sunday 26 November 2023 (with a pre-opening vernissage on the 18 and 19 May)

labiennale.org 

Abu Dhabi is a city of four base ingredients: sun, sea, sand and safety (earlier this year, it was crowned the world’s safest city for the sixth time). With immaculate beaches, jaw-dropping architecture, a climate that rarely goes south of 22 degrees, and a burgeoning cultural scene, there’s something for every mood, taste and traveller. 

Like other cities in the GCC region, including its close (but very distinct) neighbour Dubai, the UAE capital’s rapid urbanisation from desert to global destination (underpinned by abundant oil and gas resources) has transformed the city into a majestic metropolis of retail, commerce, hospitality and industry. 

Abu Dhabi tour: 8 highlights in the UAE capital

What sets Abu Dhabi apart is its cultural revolution. By 2025, the city's Saadiyat Island is set to become a cultural tourism masterpiece, firmly placing Abu Dhabi on the world stage for Emirati heritage, culture and international exchange. Arts editor Harriet Lloyd-Smith travelled to Abu Dhabi to uncover the best of the city now, and in the years to come.

Saadiyat Island

The natural island of Saadiyat, located 500m off the coast of Abu Dhabi island, is set to become something of an art and architecture mega-hub in the coming years. Already home to the Louvre Abu Dhabi, future additions, now under construction, include the Phenomena Abu Dhabi gallery (opening 2024), Adamson Associates’ Guggenheim Abu Dhabi (opening 2025) and Foster + Partners' Zayed National Museum (opening 2025). Elsewhere, David Adjaye’s Abrahamic Family House, opening in 2023, will comprise three religious spaces in one – a mosque, a synagogue and a church – seeking to nurture acceptance and peaceful coexistence across all faiths.

saadiyat-island.ae

The Bridge Wellness Hub 

Spanning a vast 8,000 sq m space – including a gym, a spa, a restaurant, a juice bar, a nutrition corner, a shop, an indoor running track and a rooftop garden – The Bridge Wellness Hub is Abu Dhabi’s all-in-one lifestyle ecosystem for the body and mind. The hub boasts a minimal design, a wide range of wellness therapies, and the latest Technogym equipment, topped off with stunning views of the Al Qana canal. Beyond a straightforward gym, the hub aims to transform members’ lives through a holistic approach to wellness, reforming the way ‘health’ is understood in line with the UAE’s National Strategy for Wellbeing 2031. If there’s anywhere to kick off a New Year’s Resolution fitness plan, it’s probably here. 

thebridgehub.com

Al Maryah Island Apple Store by Foster + Partners 

Earlier this year, Foster + Partners unveiled their multisensory design for the Al Maryah Island Apple Store, offering a new model of retail experience. Perched atop a pyramid of Absolute Black granite stone steps cascading with water, the design is defined by a stainless-steel portal entrance welcoming visitors into the single-level interior offering panoramic views of the Abu Dhabi coastline. Elsewhere, a 72ft-long mirrored foil ceiling offers a kaleidoscopic effect, accompanied by a soundtrack of water flowing down the exterior glass walls. 

fosterandpartners.com

The Louvre Abu Dhabi

Conceived of an agreement with the Louvre Museum in Paris, the Louvre Abu Dhabi celebrates its fifth anniversary this year. The Jean Nouvel-designed structure of gleaming white geometric buildings enveloped by a colossal dome of intersecting aluminium lattices proved an instant international sensation when it opened in 2017. Considered the first universal museum in the Arab world and the first addition to the major Saadiyat Island cultural development, the Louvre Abu Dhabi seeks to promote historical and contemporary cultural exchange through its vast permanent collection and temporary shows, including its current Art Here 2022, an exhibition of ten GCC artists shortlisted for the Richard Mille Art Prize.

louvreabudhabi.ae

Abu Dhabi’s Supreme Council for Motherhood & Childhood by Studio Roar

For its latest project in Abu Dhabi, interior design and architecture studio Roar has blended work, play and functionality for the UAE’s Supreme Council for Motherhood & Childhood. Spanning three levels, the space is a haven for traditional Emirati design codes with a contemporary edge, from dynamic Lego walls to pastel-hued furnishings, play areas and workspaces. As founder and creative director of Roar, Pallavi Dean, told us: ‘We wanted the design narrative to subtly allude to different cultural elements from the region while drawing attention to the SCMC’s core mission: to foster innovation and creativity in the fields of motherhood and childhood.’

The Abu Dhabi Edition Hotel

For those seeking a home-from-home with a luxury Emirati twist, the Abu Dhabi Edition Hotel has it all, three signature restaurants, a three-storey social space, two pools, two state-of-the-art fitness centres and a spa. The hotel’s 198 guest rooms are accented by a grey oak herringbone pattern that draws on local basket weaving techniques and photography by Brett Weston, which references Abu Dhabi’s desert surroundings. Three distinct culinary offerings are helmed by Michelin-starred chef Tom Aikens: Market, an all-day dining concept that uses local ingredients for an imaginative, no-waste menu; the Oak Room, offering a dose of British rock ‘n’ roll flair; and the al fresco Alba Terrace, which evokes elegant Mediterranean summers. 

editionhotels.com

Abu Dhabi Art: Artist Commissions in Cultural Sites

Unveiled for the opening of the Abu Dhabi Art fair on 16 November 2022, public art installations are now in situ across sites of historical significance as part of the fair’s Commissions in Cultural Sites programme. On view until 22 January 2023, the project sees leading contemporary artists occupy locations in the historic Al Ain in the emirate of Abu Dhabi. At Al Jahili Fort, Al Saadi’s Quipu Alphabet draws on the Incan writing system of the same name, while Shilpa Gupta’s video StillTheyKnowNotWhatIDream uses the artist’s signature double flat board format, reminiscent of notice boards in railway stations. At Al Ain Oasis, Conrad Shawcross’ Patterns of Absence (Bb36D10) - Desert Beacon responds to the contemplative potency of the desert. 

abudhabiart.ae

The Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque

For anyone visiting Abu Dhabi, the landscape-dominating Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque is a must-see. With 82 domes, 1,000 columns and 24ct gilded chandeliers, this architectural feat was unveiled in 2007 to embody the late Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan’s vision to convey the Islamic message of peace, tolerance and diversity. Notable features include the world’s largest hand-knotted carpet in the main prayer hall, and the Mosque’s astonishing 2,000 sq m floral marble decoration, designed by British artist Kevin Dean. 

szgmc.gov.ae

The Charlotte Perriand Award, the accolade handed out annually by the Créateurs Design Awards in memory of the iconic French architect and designer, has been announced to go this year to American architect Jeanne Gang. Not only did the panel of judges recognise the Chicago-based architect for her inspirational portfolio of work – highlights of which include the ongoing American Museum of Natural History's Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education, and Innovation – but also for her standout project to date, the Aqua Tower, which is also ‘the tallest building in the world to be designed by a woman, at the time of its completion'. 

The honour, which was established last year to ‘honour trailblazers in architecture and design', chose for its inaugural winner the Ghanaian-British architect Sir David Adjaye. Now in its second year, the Charlotte Perriand Award will be presented to Gang during a dedicated ceremony in Paris in January 2023. During the same event, the Créateurs Design Awards’ overall competition winners will be announced too, in categories spanning architecture, interiors, and exhibition design – nominations are currently open to submissions. 

‘It is an honour not only to be recognised by this distinguished jury but also to help continue to celebrate the legacy of Charlotte Perriand. I have long admired not only the beauty of her work but also her social and environmental positions that were in many ways far ahead of her time,' said Gang.

She continued: ‘Charlotte Perriand represents someone who fearlessly adopted the advanced tools and techniques of her time, yet deployed them with care and intelligence, finding combinations between the materials, the tools of industry, and traditional craft. She was truly forward-thinking in her desire to use design to improve the quality of life for everyone.' 

INFORMATION

createursdesignawards.com

studiogang.com

Lesley Lokko is a woman of many hats. She is an architect, having practised both in other studios and her own. She is an academic, having experienced the teaching, research and management side of the sector in a range of higher education institutions worldwide, notably at the University of Johannesburg’s Graduate School of Architecture (GSA), which she established in 2015; at the City College of New York, where she was dean of the Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture until leaving seemingly abruptly during the pandemic (more on this later); and now at Accra’s African Futures Institute, a new architecture research institute and school, which is currently being set up from scratch. She is also an accomplished fiction writer, with 12 novels under her belt, all of them having not much to do with architecture. ‘Many people are surprised when they read my books,’ she says. ‘They say it’s not what they expected from me at all.’

More recently, she was appointed the curator of the upcoming Venice Architecture Biennale, the industry’s biggest festival, which will launch its next (and 18th) iteration in May 2023. The many faces of Lesley Lokko converge under her endless calm, her hard-working ethos and refreshing attitude to risk-taking – not to mention her finely tuned stance towards the important, timely issues of diversity and inclusion in architecture, as well as the role of African culture and power in the world. All these shine through her multifaceted work in academia and beyond. 

If ever there was a shaker-upper, a real change-making force, Lokko is it. Lokko was born in Scotland to a Ghanaian father and a Scottish mother and spent her childhood in Ghana. Ghana feels most like home, although she has travelled extensively, and over the years has lived in London, LA, Chicago, Johannesburg and Edinburgh. After completing her studies at the Bartlett School of Architecture in London, she practised and taught, then had her first ‘brush with academic administration’ at the London Metropolitan University, where she was appointed academic leader in strategic planning and external affairs in 2001. Teaching and researching was one thing, but the business and administration side of university life was completely different, she recalls: ‘I thought, I don’t want to do this! But I was very lucky, I had started writing, I got an agent and a book deal, and I left academia. It was a good time to leave and I went into writing fiction for the next 10-15 years.’ But frustrations came up here, too, as Lokko found she couldn’t experiment. ‘I felt pigeonholed and, after some time, an opening came up and I went back to academia in 2014, straight into being an associate professor in South Africa.’ 

She was excited to start her role at the University of Johannesburg. ‘I could put the question of decolonisation at the centre of my work; it seemed to me that the easiest and most expedient way to do it was not to change something from inside, but to start something new – so I started the GSA,’ she explains. Despite administrative challenges, Lokko remembers her time at GSA as a fruitful experience, one that defined her and allowed her to experiment. She was there until 2019, when she was approached by the late Michael Sorkin for the deanship at City College of New York. 

Unfortunately, Lokko’s time at City College was blighted by a perfect storm of global events: the pandemic started, the murder of George Floyd prompted widespread protests, and challenges within the school soon reared their head, too. ‘In the US, whenever you have gender, race and labour involved, it’s always against the backdrop of a long history of exploitation,’ she says. The pressures felt insurmountable, which led to her decision to leave after less than a year in the post. But the US’ loss became Ghana’s gain, as the tensions at City College led her to realise that her heart was elsewhere. ‘I thought, if I don’t go back to Ghana and set up a school now, I never will. For me, it was very important that I came home. Could I take the experiences of working outside Africa for so long and translate these in a way that would resonate in West Africa?’ 

Lokko worked with graphic designer Fred Swart to visualise the school’s identity. Its name – African Futures Institute (AFI) – was established after a walk in Edinburgh, where Lokko came across the Edinburgh Futures Institute, part of the city’s university. ‘I knew I had found my name,’ she recalls. ‘From there, I got some seed funding from the Ford Foundation and the Mellon Foundation, set up some office space [right underneath her home in Accra, which is raised on stilts], found some staff [there are three people employed at the moment] and got to work.’  

AFI is a graduate school and will start with events, short courses and workshops in the first year (2023), before unfolding its full curriculum from 2024. Ghana has only one accredited architecture school, and while AFI won’t be immediately accredited (‘I want to keep it that way. I like to spend some time where I don’t have to explain and justify myself all the time,’ she says. ‘This is about imagination, not policy’), it is something Lokko feels the region desperately needs. The school already has a vibrant social media presence and she has pulled together an exciting group of mentors, advisors and associates to help her, including David Adjaye, Ashley Shaw Scott Adjaye (see page 040), Mass Design Group’s Christian Benimana, the RCA’s Thandi Loewenson, and Counterspace’s Sumayya Vally (W*265). When looking for her collaborators, she keeps an open mind – an approach that defines the whole school. ‘I first look for the people I am excited about, the right people,’ she says. ‘Then I fit them in, building the school around them.’ 

The school will offer long and short courses for students, as well as for teachers who want to learn more about the issues it will specialise in – diversity, equity and inclusion in the built environment, in particular, innovation and thought leadership from Africa and its Diaspora. Although she stresses that this is not about quotas, she envisions a make-up of 50 per cent students from Ghana, 25 per cent from other African countries, and the remaining 25 per cent from beyond. She wants to keep things accessible and open, and hopes that the wealthier students’ fees will subsidise those who don’t have the means. Some parts will be delivered in person and others will be digital, both theory and practice, and the intention is to accept students not just from an architectural background. ‘Architecture operates a bit like a nation state, always protecting its boundaries. Nine times out of ten, the protection of the discipline is about the exclusion of ‘others’,’ Lokko says. ‘We see this as a school and discipline beyond the nation state – this is about African futures not shaped by geographical boundaries.’ 

AFI won’t initially have a fixed venue, but will be threaded into Accra’s urban fabric, housed in various locations. Lokko hopes to eventually be able to commission a permanent home for it – but that’s far in the future. At the moment, the school is entirely funded by philanthropy. Courses are likely to start in 2024, after the Biennale ends and Lokko has enjoyed a break to recharge.

Meanwhile, Venice will feature heavily in Lokko’s day-to-day for the next year or so. The main exhibition’s theme, titledV‘The Laboratory of the Future’, puts Africa in the spotlight. While this curatorship and AFI happened independently of each other, they tackle similar challenges through Lokko’s key subject areas and passions – how to live in a world of binaries, and the global issues of decolonisation and decarbonisation. ‘Africa is the laboratory of the future,’ Lokko said during a Venice Biennale press conference in May. ‘We are the continent with the world’s youngest population, the fastest urbanisation, growing at a rate of four per cent per year, often at the expense of local ecosystems – so we are at the forefront of climate change, too. Yes, the show will focus on Africa, but we are not only talking about Africa – we use it as a place in order to try and understand everything everywhere. After all, the Biennale itself is a workshop for the future.’

As to what the future holds, apart from Venice and AFI (‘The school is so much a part of who I am, it’s hard to separate those two, but I hope there’s a kind of productive fusion’), she has another novel underway, with a publisher who allows her to try out new things. ‘It will be a little different to my others,’ she says. The common thread in everything is a strive to drive change in a field that can be slow to do any of those things. ‘The challenge is to work out what the form of an institution is at the same time you try to form it. I think it was Einstein who said that you can’t go around doing the same thing over and over, expecting the same result. That results in madness. You need to be open enough to invent new structures and have enough faith that they will work.’

INFORMATION

lesleylokko.com 

labiennale.org

africanfuturesinstitute.com

A version of this article appears in the August 2022 Design for a Better World issue of Wallpaper*, available from in print, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

Architect Sir David Adjaye has been announced the recipient of the 2022 Charlotte Perriand Award. The honour, which forms part of the annual series of Créateurs Design Awards (which include categories such as Best Residential Project, Best Commercial Project and Best Product Design), is the first of its kind, with Adjaye scooping the inaugural prize dedicated to design trailblazers – just like legendary French creative Charlotte Perriand. 

The new Charlotte Perriand Award has been founded in memory of the iconic French architect and designer. ‘This is the first time the Perriand family has allowed her name to be used beyond her immediate work,' the organisers point out, as Perriand’s daughter, Pernette Perriand-Barsac, celebrates Adjaye’s win: ‘When I read [Adjaye’s] words in the press or his approach that he describes on social networks, I see how great [his and my mother’s] proximity is, to the point that a real dialogue takes place beyond time.’

Says Adjaye: ‘[Charlotte Perriand] was really expansive in thinking about what the profession could be and understood the role of designers in their responsibility toward making the 21st century as beautiful and as empowering and as edifying [as possible] for people of all races – and for our human civilization to thrive.’ Recent projects by Adjaye Associates include the Cherry Groce Memorial Pavilion in Brixton, London, and 130 William in New York, while an extensive list of upcoming schemes features works such as the Africa Institute in Sharjah.

Ghanaian-British architect Adjaye is widely celebrated in his industry and beyond, having received a slew of honours, from his 2017 knighthood to the 2021 Royal Gold Medal (he was the first Black architect to receive it). Contributing to a better society and helping create positive change through design excellence are goals that form part of Adjaye’s practice – and values shared by Perriand, making this award a fitting recognition of the acclaimed architect’s important body of work.

INFORMATION

adjaye.com

createursdesignawards.com

An emerging architect with a wealth of accolades under her belt, Mariam Kamara heads Atelier Masōmī, a boutique architecture practice in Niamey, Niger. The architect gained global recognition in 2018 when she was chosen for the Rolex Mentor and Protégé scheme and mentored by Sir David Adjaye over the course of two years. She was also shortlisted for the prestigious 2019 Royal Academy Dorfman Award and has been announced a 2020 Honorary Fellow at The Royal Institute of Canada. She was also part of the 2019 Wallpaper* Architects Directory. 

Her studio was set up in 2014 and has been going from strength to strength. Kamara considers collaboration a crucial part of her work. ‘With each collaboration we push the needle further but also learn so much from the people we collaborate with,’ she explains. ‘The Hikma Religious and Secular Complex allowed us to work with local masons to reinterpret traditional Hausa architecture.‘

‘The same is true for our Niamey 2000 housing project,’ she continues, ‘where our inspiration came from pre-colonial cities in the region such as Timbuktu in Mali, Kano in Nigeria, or Zinder in Niger. [With] the Dandaji Regional Market, we managed to achieve our goal to create a space that projects a sense of confidence and aspiration for the current and future users of the market.’

Kamara’s design for the Niamey Cultural Center is currently in construction, while also being exhibited at the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale, where the architect is additionally showing an installation responding to the theme ‘How Will We Live Together?’, created in collaboration with the Tuareg Sculptors Collective in her home country.

Despite undeniable challenges ahead, the future feels exciting for Kamara. ‘What’s exciting about the future of architecture is the chance to tackle some of our biggest challenges at the moment. The demographic explosion in the Global South is one such challenge. How do we think about building capacity and infrastructure to meet this challenge while also trying not to exacerbate the climate crisis?’

INFORMATION

gabrielacarrillo.mx

A version of this article appears in Wallpaper’s October 2021, 25th Anniversary Issue (W*270), on newsstands now and available to subscribers – 12 digital issues for $12/£12/€12.
Meet more creative leaders of the future nominated by architect Frida Escobedo here.

When Sir David Adjaye drinks, there are no half measures. ‘One of my uncles is a huge whisky fan in Ghana,’ he tells me via Zoom. ‘West Africans brew all these high-octane things – they call it akpeteshie. Very DIY, but very loved. Whisky feels like something that’s really engaging with the body; I love that fire that goes down you. It makes you feel so alive.’

It seems, then, that far from being a surprise move, the RIBA Royal Gold Medal-winning architect’s newest project – designing the case and decanter for the oldest whisky ever to be freshly bottled – makes complete sense.

In 1940, in Elgin, north-east Scotland, 26 years before Adjaye was born, father-and-son whisky team John and George Urquhart were considering the latest batch they had acquired from Glenlivet Distillery. John had worked his way from apprentice to sole owner of Gordon & MacPhail, one of Scotland’s finest bottlers. Their decision to put aside a cask of Glenlivet for 80 years, knowing they would never taste it, took experience, foresight, and a little madness.

Stephen Rankin, director of prestige at Gordon & MacPhail, and fourth-generation member of the Urquhart family, explains that the pair weren’t averse to forging a path: ‘You can release a blend when it’s three years old, but in the 1970s, George released Macallan whisky from 1937, for £4.50 a bottle. It’s worth tens of thousands of pounds today.’ 

The result of this long-term thinking is Gordon & MacPhail’s latest release: the Generations 80 Years Old from Glenlivet Distillery, the oldest single malt Scotch whisky ever bottled. Maturation is a delicate art, especially when dealing with a spirit as rare as this, and decades of judgement has paid off.

The 80YO, at an astounding 44.9 per cent ABV, is remarkably multifaceted. Each sip of the amber liquid brings forward new notes, from citrus to vanilla and leather. While requiring astronomical restraint, leaving a drop in the glass overnight to revisit the next day brings its own rewards of lingering fragrances that transport you to a comfy corner in an old library.

Generations of craft

There’s a smokiness here, missing from most Speyside drams, that’s linked to the whisky’s age: distillers in 1940 would malt barley on site, creating more varied flavours. Decades on, the 80YO’s light smoke settles into the background, elevating the lighter notes at the forefront. It’s magnificent, the result of generations of care.

Adjaye’s pavilion-like oak enclosure, crafted at Wardour Workshops in Dorset, pays homage to the wood that made this whisky possible. When the oak tree harvested to make the cask first sprang to life in 1840, Queen Victoria had just married Prince Albert.

A century later, after housing mosto (pressed grape juice), sobretables (newly fermented wine) and sherry, Cask No. 340 was sent from Spain’s Jerez to Elgin, to be filled with Glenlivet’s best spirit, made rarer by the wartime rationing of barley. 

David Adjaye on his decanter design

There’s an enigmatic nature to Adjaye’s case, with only narrow slits in the front teasing at the interior. Innovative hinges click open to reveal the crystal decanter inside, topped with darkened oak to connect the whisky with the wood to which it owes its flavour. Individually hand-blown at Scotland’s Glencairn Crystal Studio, each decanter is encased by thick glass and two cut lenses, both magnifying the liquid inside and helping you keep a firm grip.

‘I’ve been obsessed with glass for a long time,’ says Adjaye. ‘It’s another world. There are certain proportions and certain flows: bottles follow some crazy laws. I did everything just to slow you down. I basically want you to really appreciate it – I don’t want you to casually pick it up. Please give it some respect, pick it up with two hands, watch the liquid slowly descend.’

This considered approach has been key to the work of Gordon & MacPhail for generations. ‘It’s all about the long term,’ says Rankin. ‘We’re not looking at how things will look for the fifth generation, it’s how it’ll look for the sixth, seventh generations.’

Adjaye, too, takes the long view: ‘I think that within five years, if you’re not doing anything meaningful about sustainability, your business is going to suffer, no matter how good your brand is,’ he says. ‘For younger generations, it’s not even a conversation. “How are you not thinking about this? Are you mad?” They’ll be laughing at us; we’ll be like the tobacco industry.’

To this end, Gordon & MacPhail supports the local charity Trees for Life in its mission to rewild the Caledonian Forest and, along with Adjaye, has committed to similar projects in West Africa. Proceeds from the sale of decanter #1, due to be auctioned at Sotheby’s Hong Kong in early October with an estimate between £80k and £140k, will go towards the Trees for Life nursery, which grows 100,000 native and rare trees (including oaks) from seed each year. 

Time and patience are concepts that seem in short supply in the modern world. For the fields of architecture and whisky, they’re two of the most important. With this project, the disciplines have combined to create a product that respects the past, embraces the present and focuses on the future. Not bad for something that’s been sitting around for 80 years.

INFORMATION

Public showcases of the Generations 80 Years Old will be held in London, New York and Hong Kong as part of Sotheby’s 2021 Hong Kong Autumn Sales Series preview exhibition

sothebys.com 

gordonandmacphail.com

adjaye.com

The Africa Institute has commissioned David Adjaye and Adjaye Associates for its new, state-of-the-art building in Sharjah, UAE, and the designs have just been revealed. Dominated by strong geometric volumes in soft pink hues, the new Africa Institute is set to become a key centre for the study, research and documentation of Africa and the African diaspora in the Arab world. 

The institute’s new campus, spearheaded by its director Salah M Hassan and president Hoor Al Qasimi, was conceived to be multifunctional and multi-faceted, supporting the busy organisation’s many activities – including international symposia and conferences, art exhibitions, commissions, film, performances, and a higher education programme set to roll out from 2023, alongside a varied public programme. First conceived in 1976 as part of the Symposium on African and Arab Relations, the Africa Institute has been housed up till now in the Africa Hall, a building on site that will be incorporated into the Adjaye Associates scheme.

All activities will be located within the colourful design’s four wings, all of which are united by a series of open-air interior courtyards and architectural gardens. The colours and volume arrangement of the structure responds to the region’s land and climatic needs, explains Adjaye. Large overhangs and shaded open-air spaces featuring water elements and planting are designed to ‘enhance the desert typology' and work with the needs of the natural context. Meanwhile, open entryways connect the site with the urban surroundings. 

‘I am deeply humbled for the opportunity to design The Africa Institute in Sharjah, a project that introduces an entirely new type of thinking and mission into the global academic arena,’ says Adjaye. ‘I envision the new campus as a springboard for the concretisation of the incredible history of Africa, the African diaspora, and the Arab world.’

The new building, finely tuned to support this important institution for critical thinkers in its field, is currently scheduled for completion in 2023.

INFORMATION

adjaye.com

Adam Pendleton and David Adjaye have united for the first time for a two-person exhibition, on display at Hong Kong’s Pace gallery. New paintings from Pendleton will join Adjaye’s marble sculptures in exploring a shared preoccupation with identity: the works, playing with our perceptions, offer a subversive hint that everything isn’t as it first appears.

Pendleton’s new painting, Untitled (WE ARE NOT), considers the tension between language and representation with a juxtaposition of textures. A clash of layers of spray paint, pronounced brush marks, collages and photographs express an unease, resulting in a seemingly uncompleted work that resists a neat finish. Ends left untied emphasise the pressing need for resolution.

In the paintings, the words ‘We’, ‘Are’ and ‘Not’ are inscribed repeatedly in a confusion of configurations that raises infinite questions: Who are we not? Who is the not-we? What is not? The words, in refusing to remain in a discernible pattern, resist easy interpretation. The paintings, building on the foundation of Pendleton’s 2008 work Black Dada, which marked the beginning of his exploration into the fragmentation of language, show just how easy it can be to read multiple truths from language – showing, ultimately, the fiction of fundamental truth.

For Adjaye, it is the layering intrinsic to the formation of the marble process that reflects the gravitas of a cultural history. The compression of the marble, which leaves thick, letter-like veins on the surface, communicates in a different way; the ancient Egyptian forms his pyramid sculptures take links back to the innovation of the ancient African world. The independent forms, despite appearing immovable in their solidity, can be rearranged in a multitude of ways in an echo of the ambiguity Pendleton demonstrates with language.

The exhibition is the natural culmination of a relationship that began in 2016 with an exhibition Pendleton installed at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, a building designed by Adjaye. A shared concern with the politics of space and a passion for art and architecture naturally culminated in an exhibition expressing their mutual interests.

INFORMATION

’David Adjaye Adam Pendleton’, until 30 June 2021, Pace Hong Hong, pacegallery.com

ADDRESS

12/F, H Queen’s
80 Queen’s Road Central, Hong Kong

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The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) has unveiled a new platform on Google Arts and Culture. The platform launches with 15 online stories free to view, from the creation of New York’s Central Park to a deep-dive into the aesthetically-pleasing Picturesque movement.

Stories take a wider look at cultural shifts, dissecting the impact of popular culture and inviting contributions from architects. The just-launched Civic Architecture in Modern Ghana topic takes six civic buildings from the Republic of Ghana as a focus, tracing their development from the time of late imperialism through to the present day through the works of Jane Drew, Maxwell Fry, Lindsey Drake and Sir Denis Lasdun. Sir David Adjaye’s designs for a new Cathedral for Accra are also included in a timely nod to Adjaye, who is the 2021 recipient of RIBA’s Royal Gold Medal. Footage from an interview between him and Lesley Lokko, who is starting an architecture school in Ghana, is included in the channel.

The rich diversity of content includes some never-before-exhibited objects, including landscape designer Sir Humphrey Repton’s drawings and business card, private photographs from architects, portraits, parks and garden designs. Other highlights include original drawings by Ernö Goldfinger, Étienne-Louis Boullée and Toyo Ito. The work of Walter Gropius, Pier Luigi Nervi, Kenzo Tange and Diller Scofidio & Renfro are just some of the featured projects from RIBA’s collection which are looked at in closer detail on the channel.

‘This new partnership with Google Arts & Culture creates a great opportunity to inspire and delight a global audience and to showcase our unique treasures. We look forward to curating more online experiences and exhibitions, to illustrate the impact and importance of design and architecture, throughout the ages and around the world,’ says RIBA CEO Alan Vallance. Adds Amit Sood, director of Google Arts & Culture: ‘RIBA has one of the world’s leading architecture collections and inspires and supports global architectural talent as we look to designing the future.’

INFORMATION

artsandculture.google.com

It was only last summer that Adjaye Associates unveiled its concept for the Cherry Groce memorial design in London's Brixton. Now, less than a year on, the important monument by David Adjaye and his team has been built and installed on site at Windrush Square, the neighbourhood in which Groce lived. 

The structure commemorates Groce, who in 1985, was shot by police in her London home at the age of 37. She was left paralyzed, and passed away less than 30 years later, as a direct result of her injuries. The memorial was commissioned by the Cherry Groce Foundation, a charity founded to support marginalised Black, Caribbean and African communities. 

Acting as an installation to honour Groce and a visual reminder of the event to all, the pavilion was also created as a place for the local community. Integrated benches provide space for passers-by to sit and children to play, while its single, strong column represents Groce's strength; and its gravity-defying, triangular canopy mirrors the community's ability to shelter and protect. Structural engineers AKT II ensured the installation is balanced to perfection. 

‘I am honoured to celebrate the unveiling of this project and the representation it brings to the black community for Brixton, London, and the UK at large,' says Adjaye. ‘It is my sincere hope that the restorative justice that is borne from the making of this pavilion can help us all learn from and be better neighbors to each other in the city that we live in.'

The memorial was unveiled on 25 April 2021 at a ribbon cutting ceremony in Windrush Square.

INFORMATION

adjaye.com

David Adjaye's 130 William is one of the most eagerly awaited luxury residential completions in New York; and the time has come to reveal the design-led property's impressive interiors. Works have now been completed and the 800 ft tall residential building in Manhattan has released imagery of its model apartment and communal areas. 

The bold and elegant high rise by real-estate developer Lightstone has been designed by Adjaye Associates both inside and out. This allowed the architects to adopt a unified, coherent design approach that is reflected equally in interiors and exterior. The results are striking. 

The development's 242 apartments range from studios to generous, four-bedroom homes. Luxurious materials and detailed craftsmanship define the interior aesthetic, while the building's signature oversized bronze arched windows become a key feature inside too. The bronze theme continues in customised fixtures and hardware throughout, and a sense of layered, textured minimalism prevails. 

‘In defining the design for 130 William, I sought to celebrate New York City’s heritage of masonry architecture, referencing the historical architecture once pervasive upon one of the city’s earliest streets,' says Adjaye, who is behind acclaimed projects such as the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture on the National Mall in Washington, DC; the UK Holocaust Memorial & Learning Centre in London; and the National Cathedral in Accra, Ghana. ‘However, and more importantly, 130 William has been crafted to focus on the new possibilities of urban, vertical living,' he adds. 

Apart from the residential element, the building includes a wide range of amenities for the residents. Lifestyle and wellness areas include a health club, with full spa and infinity-edge spa pool; a private IMAX movie theatre; a golf simulator; and a residents’ lounge, club and game room. 

Adjaye Associates worked with local architect Hill West on the project. The first residents have already started moving in and the building's full completion is expected in autumn 2021.

INFORMATION
adjaye.com

WINNER

Bat Trang House, Bat Trang, Vietnam

Vo Trong Nghia created this modern take on the traditional Vietnamese shophouse near Hanoi for an affluent artisanal family that produces high-quality ceramic products. Following the local vernacular, Bat Trang House combines commercial and residential spaces. The raised ground and lower ground floors serve as showrooms for the family to display and sell their products. Four additional private levels with a kitchen, living room, five bedrooms and several airy gardens sit above. The top floor includes a dedicated room for the family altar and an open-air swimming pool bordered by trees and plants. Vo wanted the personality and heritage of the craft village (Bat Trang, some 15km from Hanoi, is known for its ceramics production) to be evident in the architecture, so he wrapped the property in a wall made of perforated red clay ceramic tiles that he commissioned in the village. This ceramic cloak protects the house from the sun in the summer and from the wind in the winter, while the holes ensure that the house still gets plenty of natural light. Large gaps allow for the trees and plants from the elevated gardens to burst through the terracotta-coloured façade.

vtnarchitects.net

KEY FEATURES: red brick, outdoor/indoor relationship, lattice walls, live/work space, local craft 
ARCHITECT’S PREVIOUS WORK: Diamond Island Community Centre, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam; Chicland Hotel, Danang, Vietnam; House for Trees, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

SHORTLIST

Mole House, London, UK

Searching for her new home, artist Sue Webster was attracted to a derelict Hackney house that had previously made headlines for its eccentric owner, the ‘Mole Man’ – a landlord who had spent years burrowing a network of tunnels beneath the property. He had subdivided and rented it out in a haphazard way and with no planning permission, compromising its structure. Webster collaborated closely with Adjaye Associates, which redesigned the house. Burrows were plugged with aerated concrete and some 33 tonnes of debris were removed from the site. The design drew on archaeological processes. The house now spans three levels, with the top two dedicated to the residential part, including an expansive living room with large openings, two bedrooms and a study. The lower level hosts the studio space. The material palette is fairly restricted, ranging from exposed concrete and wood, to brick, but all decisions were about ‘creating contrast, continuity or revealing authentic parts of history’, explains Sir David Adjaye. Original masonry was preserved, exterior render was retained, and some 15,000 reclaimed bricks were used throughout. The interior was completely gutted and now a cross-shaped concrete structure in the centre of the plan helps divide different areas, as well as support the floors. 

adjaye.com

KEY FEATURES: concrete, wood and brick structure, raw materials, live/work space, renovation
ARCHITECTS’ PREVIOUS WORK: Ruby City, San Antonio, TX, USA; Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture, Washington DC, USA; Moscow School of Management, Skolkovo, Russia; Dirty House, London, UK 

House of the Big Arch, South Africa

In House of the Big Arch, Johannesburg-based outfit Frankie Pappas sought to both sensitively and spectacularly introduce a newly constructed home to a wild South African forest. The building’s frontage reads like a vertiginous tree trunk and the project is organised as one long, thin (just 330cm wide) building so as not to interfere with any existing sylvan activity – not a single tree was demolished during the process. The structure is made of weathered-looking, bark-toned, rough stock brick, which will both reference and complement the sandstone of the Waterberg Mountains in the surrounding bushveld nature reserve. A raised living space reaches high up into the tree canopy and its roof is planted with endemic grasses, succulents and shrubs. Frankie Pappas is a freeform group, ‘fictional persona’ and ‘collective pseudonym’ that encourages coders, engineers, mathematicians, artists and managers to work with draughtsmen and architects to make ‘remarkable spaces’. ‘This is a home that disappears into the landscape;
that sits amongst the rocks and trees and birds; that offers animals and plants and humans equal opportunity to find shelter, that treats the bushveld with its deserved respect,’ say the designers. ‘We cannot ever divide architecture, landscape and gardening. They are one.’

frankiepappas.com

KEY FEATURES: weathered brick, natural setting, environmentally friendly
ARCHITECTS’ PREVIOUS WORK: House with a Yellow Wall, Johannesburg, South Africa; House with the Tall Chimneys, Waterberg, South Africa

Barghouti House, Jordan

Massive, monumental and hunkered into the hillside, this concrete behemoth, hand-sanded to an almost fleshy finish, is the work of architect, urban theorist and painter Sahel Al Hiyari. Barghouti House blends a modernist form with an appreciation for the archaic, inspired by what the architect terms Jordan’s ‘almost indecisive identity’ – its millennia of cultural influences (Bedouin, Nabatean, Roman, Umayyad and Ottoman, through to the 20th century’s ‘isms’). The structure, which has a sense of timelessness, is conceived as a collection of massive slabs that appears monolithic but also weightless. Seen from the rear, the point of entry, the building is an almost windowless layering of dynamic floating angles, solid floor plates and cantilevered sculptural massing, and doesn’t initially read as domestic. Vast mirrored doors reflect the landscape. A courtyard separates two bedroom wings. The warm wood panelling and spare but inviting interiors are a collaboration between Al Hiyari and Lebanese design duo David/Nicolas. Soft light filters through skylights, lightwells and the deeply recessed floor-to-ceiling windows that open onto the pool, more gardens and the panoramic views over the surrounding hills. A modest ceiling height of 2.3m creates a sense of compression that guides the eye out towards the vistas. Landscaping is by Lara Zureikat.

sahelalhiyari.com; davidandnicolas.com

KEY FEATURES: brutalist architecture, concrete, indoor/outdoor relationships, minimalism
ARCHITECT’S PREVIOUS WORK: A Shaban House, Amman, Jordan; T Bdeir House, Amman, Jordan; Amman Design Week exhibition design

PW house, Ontario, Canada

Toronto-based Brigitte Shim and Howard Sutcliffe started working on the masterplan of this  five-acre plot on Point William, Lake Muskoka, in 1997. This house – the main one in the compound – is the latest addition to the larger project that serves as an extended family’s weekend retreat. The architects’ scheme unfolds cinematically, as a succession of vistas. The house is clad in rough-hewn blocks of local stone, self-rusting steel and ipe wood – materials that require no maintenance and are already beginning to weather. They sandwich a band of glass, shaded by irregularly spaced mullions, and this horizontal layering of materials breaks up the mass of the 6,500 sq ft house. Terraces take up the north and east corners of the building. A feeling of tactility enhances the spatial drama of the interior, with its snug bedrooms, expansive kitchen and lofty living spaces. Shim-Sutcliffe has brought rusted steel inside, but with the texture of smooth leather. Boldly grained Douglas fir clads the ceiling; straight-grained fir is employed for panelling and cabinetry. Granite, quarried in Quebec, reveals a watery pattern on the floor and turns soft grey when flamed for the hearths. Natural light washes some surfaces, reflects off others, highlighting details and constantly changing.

shim-sutcliffe.com 

KEY FEATURES: timber architecture, craftsmanship, sense of place, tactile surfaces 
ARCHITECTS’ PREVIOUS WORK: Integral House, Toronto, Canada; Laneway House, Toronto, Canada 

INFORMATION

Wallpaper* Design Awards

There’s an unmistakeable aura of brutish charm surrounding 130 William, the new residential development from Adjaye Associates. Currently rising above New York’s William Street in Manhattan, the 66-storey tower will house over 240 high-end condos and a full suite of residential amenities, including residents’ lounge, private IMAX theatre, pool and spa. Sir David and his team have adapted the city’s industrial aesthetic into a new residential paradigm, translating the rhythmic forms of the brick warehouse into a vaulted concrete structure, its façade serrated by concrete colonnades that provide sheltered loggias for the apartments within.

Up on the 59th and 60th floor are five very special apartments, created by Adjaye in close collaboration with Aston Martin’s specialist industrial design division and Lightstone developers. Intended as a bespoke set of turnkey apartments, each unit created by the partnership adds to the fixtures and fittings specified by Adjaye Associates with a carefully selected collection of furnishings, many of which are drawn from Aston Martin’s own range, developed along with the Italian manufacturer Formitalia. Expect dark, brooding tones, bronze, smoked glass and dark stained oak, along with a scattering of design classics.

The two and three-bedroom apartments can be arranged so that the spare bedroom serves as either an office or a futuristic sounding ‘Simulator Room’ incorporating a customised version of the Aston Martin-designed Curv Racing Simulator, a professional grade machine for video game aficionados (or even real racing drivers).

As well as the furniture, custom design elements and the optional Sim, Aston and Sir David put their heads together to create a special edition car for the new owners of the apartments. The 130 William Adjaye Special Edition Aston Martin DBX is not only a bit of a mouthful, but it’s the first Aston Martin to be given an architect-led makeover. Working with Q by Aston Martin and Chief Creative Officer Marek Reichman, Sir David has brought hitherto unfamiliar materials, textures and colours into the DBX interior, including grey ‘Pietra D’Avola' marble inlays and carved solid walnut trim. Parliament Green leather and a bespoke exterior paint finish inspired by the building’s dark concrete façade complete the package. Just like the apartments it complements, the car splices old world warmth with contemporary style.

INFORMATION

130william.com
adjaye.com
astonmartin.com

Conceived as a commemoration to those lost in the fight against terrorism along Niger’s southern and western borders, Le Mémorial des Martyrs – the Martyrs' Memorial – is a new public monument for the West African country's capital that has just been unveiled by Adjaye Associates. 

The concrete structure is designed as a symbol against extremism combining the sculptural memorial with new urban plaza and a multi-use civic gathering space. The 4000 sq m project is set on a triangular plot that is gently sloped, guiding the gaze upwards through the incline and the design's verticality – while remaining connected to the land through tactile, robust materials, such as bronze-toned frames and perforated steel panels. 

The concept is dominated by a forest of 20m tall columns, arranged over a plinth that conceals an abstract labyrinth. This is sheltered responding to the region's frequent intense heat and the local Sahelian climate, says the architecture team, continuing to explain how the cool air from this part of the structure help maintain a pleasant atmosphere for this new civic space. ‘The underground cooling labyrinth provides air to the main space with the pillars acting as thermal chimneys that mitigate heat build up.'

A grid of trees flanks the composition. A play of transparencies, views, light and shadow define the design. This continues at night, when the memorial transforms with beams of light shining upwards from every column towards the sky – to a design by lighting and sustainability specialists Steensen Varming – creating a beacon of remembrance and hope for Niamey.

‘Through an interplay of absences and voids, the Martyrs Memorial becomes a sacred space – an in-between moment for meaningful reflection on the past and a signaling for a peaceful future,' says firm founder Sir David Adjaye.

INFORMATION

adjaye.com

The RIBA has presented Sir David Adjaye OBE with the Royal Gold Medal for architecture. The Ghanaian-British architect was announced to be the coveted accolade's recipient for 2021 this past September. Adjaye set up his studio in 2000 and has since produced an exceptional body of work. He has been influenced, he says, by ‘contemporary art, music and science to African art forms and the civic life of cities'. 

The honour's ceremony was broadcasted in a digital event across the globe, reaching from London to Accra (where the architect is currently located), the US and India. The beautifully presented event took place yesterday evening and included messages and congratulations from leading figures in the industry and beyond, from Theaster Gates (who was recently announced to design the 2022 Serpentine Pavilion) to Balkrishna Doshi and President Barack Obama. Meanwhile a discussion between Adjaye and Adjaye Associates associate principal  Lucy Tilley tracked the architect's journey so far and touched upon several of his current, prestigious works, such as the National Cathedral of Ghana. 

Widely acknowledged as one of the world’s highest honours for architecture, the Royal Gold Medal is approved personally by Her Majesty The Queen. Its recipient is a person or group of people ‘who have had a significant influence either directly or indirectly on the advancement of architecture,' explains the RIBA. Adjaye has certainly done so, through critically acclaimed work that bridges history, community, debates about cities and urbanity and the arts, with a contemporary aesthetic – from the 2004/2005 Idea Stores in London, two community libraries, to the more recent Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC (2016).

‘It’s incredibly humbling and a great honour to have my peers recognise the work I have developed with my team and its contribution to the field over the past 25 years,' said the architect at the award's announcement. ‘Architecture, for me, has always been about the creation of beauty to edify all peoples around the world equally and to contribute to the evolution of the craft. The social impact of this discipline has been and will continue to be the guiding force in the experimentation that informs my practice. A heartfelt and sincere moment of gratitude and thanks to all the people who supported the journey to get to this moment.'

The multi-award winner, who counts among his gongs the Best New Public Building at the 2020 Wallpaper* Design Awards for Ruby City in San Antonio, was knighted in the 2017 New Year Honours for services to architecture (following an OBE in 2007), and is continually going from strength to strength. Current work at his Accra, London and New York studios includes 130 William, a high-rise residential tower in New York’s financial district;  the Princeton University Art Museum in Princeton, New Jersey in collaboration with Cooper Robertson; The Abrahamic Family House, an interfaith complex in Abu Dhabi; the UK Holocaust Memorial and Learning Centre, London led by Adjaye Associates, with Ron Arad Architects as Memorial Architect, and Gustafson Porter + Bowman as Landscape Architect; and the National Cathedral of Ghana in Accra. 

‘Through his work as an architect Sir David Adjaye speaks confidently across cultures, disciplines, politics and continents. His body of work is global and local, finely attuned as it reflects and responds to context and community, climate and culture,' said the 2021 RIBA Honours Committee. 

INFORMATION

architecture.com

In 1985, Cherry Groce was shot by police in her London home at the age of 37. She was left paralyzed, later passing away aged 63 as a direct result of injuries sustained that day. In her honour, Adjaye Associates has created a memorial design to be installed in Windrush Square, Brixton, the neighbourhood in which Groce lived.

The project, designed for the Cherry Groce Foundation, a charity founded to support marginalised Black, Caribbean and African communities, will not only serve as a visual reminder and memorial piece, but is also conceived as a pavilion for the local community. Providing shading and seating for passers-by, the structure was composed to complement the square's existing features and geometry. 

‘Sir David Adjaye’s vision for the memorial aims to create awareness and understanding of the life, strength, and experience of Cherry Groce and her family,' the studio states. The single column represents Groce's strength, and the roof symbolises the Brixton community's ability to provide shelter. The piece is designed as a permanent reminder of the terrible injustice that Groce suffered.

‘The construction of this memorial will speak to restorative justice and will symbolise that what matters to the community, matters to London and the whole world,' says Adjaye. ‘This tragedy went too long in the public realm without acknowledgement and there is now renewed urgency and importance in finally facing this history'.

INFORMATION

adjaye.com

London Design Museum's weekly #DesignDispatches series sees the museum's chief executive and director Tim Marlow in discussion with leading lights from the intersecting worlds of fashion, design and architecture. In this special edition, which you are able to watch on the museum's Instagram at 2pm on Saturday 16 May, Marlow moderates the conversation between architect Sir David Adjaye and fashion designer Stella McCartney.

Alongside inspiring insights into the two creative giant's careers, they discuss the similarities between their respective industries, how sustainability plays a central part in their ethos', and how technology is influencing both worlds. They also speak to the very prescient matter of how the architecture and fashion communities will respond to the Covid-19 world.

‘It's the first time in history that we're going be able to have geography lessons on this impact. And understand what the true impact is of the human on the planet and its resources,' says McCartney during the discussion, of the pandemic.

The pairing of the two speakers is a clever one; it speaks to the intersection of their respective industries. ‘Exploring the interconnected nature of various areas of design as well as their differences is something that fascinates me, explains Marlow. ‘So the chance to bring Stella and David together and listen to their ensuing conversation was inspiring and revelatory. It reinforces the idea that design in its broadest and richest sense holds the key to so much of our collective future.'

The talk forms part of a lively digital programme from the Design Museum, which also features a design-minded home schooling course. Stella McCartney, too, is presenting collaborative work on its Instagram, where creatives from across the ‘StellaVision' network come together to share the ways to thrive and survive in this new reality.

INFORMATION

designmuseum.org

A couple of years back, Sue Webster was hunting for a new home. ‘I wanted to move out of Shoreditch', explains the London-based contemporary artist, ‘as it was becoming unbearable to live there as an artist, one didn’t have room to think for oneself. I kinda fell in love with de Beauvoir after visiting friends for Christmas one year. It felt warm and safe, but not too safe, as it was still only walking distance from the madness of Kingsland Road. I almost bought my friend’s house around the corner, but when it came to the crunch I just couldn’t bring myself to do it as it felt too "normal".'

Soon, an intriguingly  odd situation provided the solution she was looking for. ‘Cycling home one day, I came across the most dilapidated house in the neighbourhood. It was boarded up, covered in scaffolding with a 2.5m high corrugated fence around it and a notice pinned to it from Hackney Council – it just said "KEEP OUT!!" – in every way, and I thought to myself "now there’s a challenge". So I called the Council to find out more and they just said ‘Google the Mole Man’, which then opened up a whole new can of worms. From that moment, I knew I just had to have it.'

Rewind just a couple of years and the house was making headlines for its rather eccentric owner, locally known as the ‘Mole Man' – a landlord who had spent years burrowing a network of tunnels beneath the property, subdividing and renting it out in a haphazard way and with no planning permission, compromising the overall structural integrity of the building. This left the house in an uninhabitable state, needing some serious design and engineering work to bring it back to life. 

Webster called upon award winning architect David Adjaye, whom she worked with on a previous home (with Tim Noble), the Dirty House, to help her transform the challenging site into a flowing, modern work/live interior. Adjaye jumped to the opportunity; both architect and client were captivated by the house's architectural and social history. 

‘Working with artists has always been a critical part of my practice and I’ve been lucky enough to have worked with Sue since the early stages of my career', he says. ‘The Mole House intrigued me because it had the same type of epochal quality to it as Dirty House and has really become ingrained as a piece of London’s archaeology. While the Dirty House was about a sort of industrial archaeology, the Mole House speaks to a time in London’s history that antagonized the status quo, which we then had to consider in the context of Sue’s live-work scenario. The wonderful thing was the brief was the same as the Dirty House [studio and home] so it really was about the relationship to this incredible piece of London’s history. We had to negotiate what it was that we should hold onto, what we had to let go of,  and what we had to establish new relations with.' 

Ruby City is clad in crimson-coloured precast concrete panels made in Mexico City. 

Treating the house in this way found Webster in complete agreement. ‘I wanted to preserve the house’s history, but also construct my own history on top,' she recalls. So, in order to revive the property, burrows were plugged with aerated concrete and some 33 tonnes of debris were removed from site. Once the house was reinstated structurally, the design developed, drawing on archaeological processes, which was no lesser challenge. 

‘It was kind of like a pile of bricks that was just disintegrating— it’s an incredibly fragile piece of work! The Mole Man had really destabilized the house in ways that we couldn’t entirely understand or predict,‘ says Adjaye. ‘Another challenge was that between the time the Mole Man was taken away from it and Sue buying the house, the roof had fallen in and was dilapidated quite radically.‘

The house now spans three levels, with the top two dedicated to the residential part, including an expansive living room with large openings looking out towards the quiet residential streets, two bedrooms and a study. The lower level hosts the studio space, where Webster created her most recent piece - and the first one in this new workspace - ‘The Crime Scene', a striking composition of ephemera and artwork from the artist's teenage years. A book published by Rizzoli and entitled I Was A Teenage Banshee accompanies the work, as a part-personal memoir and part-exploration of the ongoing influence of youth, music, and Siouxsie and the Banshees.

The material palette is strong, yet fairly restricted, ranging from exposed concrete and wood, to brick, but all decisions were about ‘creating contrast and creating continuity or revealing authentic parts of history', explains Adjaye. Original masonry was preserved, exterior render was retained, and some 15,000 reclaimed bricks were used throughout. The interior was completely gutted and now a cross-shaped concrete structure in the centre of the plan helps divide different areas, as well as supports the floors.

The close, fruitful collaboration between architect and client is evident through the house's overall streamlined consistency and conceptual strength. Webster seems delighted. ‘It’s almost a cross between a second world war bunker in Berlin... and a normal house,’ she concludes.

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INFORMATION

adjaye.com 
‘I Was a Teenage Banshee‘ by Sue Webster is out now, published by Rizzoli 

In the rising tradition of wealthy collectors setting up private museums, San Antonio — historic home to the 19th-century Texas Revolution — has just been graced with its own contemporary-art Mecca. Designed by Sir David Adjaye OBE (his first building in the Lone Star State), Ruby City was envisioned by the late philanthropist, artist and collector Linda Pace — once an heiress to the Pace Foods empire, responsible for the American favourite ‘Picante’ salsa. The 1,300-square metre complex is now home to the growing Linda Pace Foundation’s collection, currently strong of 900 works, and is set to become a new cultural destination for the city of 1.5m. 

‘It was born from the inside out', Adjaye tells me when we meet at the freshly-inaugurated building, which is partly inspired by the region’s Spanish Missions. Its exterior skin is made of an earthy-red precast concrete fabricated in Mexico City, polished for the first three metres up and rough thereafter, encrusted with varying shades of red glass. Two crowning lanterns adorn the top of the structure, creating an animated roofline which draws natural light into the gallery spaces. ‘The emotional quality of the building has been consistent from the start', says the architect.

Pace, who tragically lost her battle to cancer in 2007 — only months after commissioning the building — had been introduced to Adjaye by her friend, the artist and filmmaker Isaac Julien, whose work she had collected since the 1990s. ‘David was the first person who came to my lips', remembers Julien of the first time Pace shared her ambition of creating a museum, which she claimed came to her in a dream. 

Adjaye, who founded his eponymous practice in 2000, was still largely unknown to the mainstream at the time, having mostly completed modest residential projects and artists collaborations, including a light installation with Olafur Eliasson at the 2005 Venice Biennale and Chris Ofili’s The Upper Room at Victoria Miro Gallery in London. ‘She had confidence in me at an early stage in my career', remembers the now internationally-acclaimed architect, whose iconic National Museum of African American History and Culture — designed in collaboration with the Freelon Group and Davis Brody Bond — opened in Washington DC in 2016, the year before he was knighted. 

In the making for twelve years, the $16m-San Antonio project faced a number of complications, including budget reductions in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crash. But its extended development period also allowed for a refinement that is rarely experienced in the fast-paced building industry. ‘Architecture gets better when you have time', explains Adjaye who, when the museum finally materialised, had accrued significant cultural building experience.

Ruby City opened this past weekend with an inaugural exhibition in three parts. The group display ‘Waking Dreams', on view until 2022, explores notions of vulnerability and resilience, drawing over 50 works from the permanent collection — ranging from paintings and works on paper to sculptures and installations — by local and international artists including Marina Abramović, Cornelia Parker and Glenn Ligon. The exhibition is complemented by an immersive video installation by Isaac Julien and an additional group presentation at Pace’s adjacent former studio. Meanwhile, the museum’s sculpture garden features a large-scale sculpture by Texas-born artist Nancy Rubins and a sound installation by Turner Prize-winning Scottish-artist Susan Philipsz.

San Antonio’s new cultural landmark may seem a modest addition to the growing network of lavish private-foundations à la Museo Jumex in Mexico City or Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris. But its human scale allows for its founder’s exuberant taste and personality to shine through like in a cabinet of wonders. ‘She’s transitioned to the forever', says Adjaye of the late visionary philanthropist. ‘Now everyone can come and see this jewel she’s given the city.'

INFORMATION

adjaye.com

Sir David Adjaye’s design for Ghana’s first national pavilion at the Venice Biennale brings earth and traditional architecture from Ghana to Venice. ‘Ghana Freedom’ recognises the country’s history, independence and global presence today, through the pavilion design and the ideas of the six artists on display, who span three generations.

The idea for the pavilion was sparked and facilitated by Adjaye and curator Nana Oforiatta Ayim, who were joined by art world tour de force Okwui Enwezor (1963-2019), who sadly passed away in March, as a strategic advisor.

Named ‘Ghana Freedom’ after the song by E.T. Mensah composed in celebration of independence from British colonial rule in 1957, when the nation of Ghana was established, the pavilion is a proud moment for Ghana. For Oforiatta Ayim the pavilion represents ‘finally moving out of the “postcolonial” moment into one we have yet to envision’.

The exhibition takes a global approach to nationhood, where the artists travel beyond borders, cross diasporas and trace migration, and the conversation feels liberated from the past, because the present is so multi-dimensional, creative and all-consuming.

Adjaye’s aim was to bring the colours and textures of Ghana to Venice through the design – and to reflect on life in the country over the past century alongside the artists. The dynamism of the art works and their stories is echoed in the smooth curves of Adjaye’s design. Visitors are welcomed in and led around elliptically-shaped spaces echoing the curved walls of traditional earth houses built in the village of Sirigu in the Upper East Region of Ghana.

The pavilion descends on the art and its visitors like an atmosphere, one of dry grainy heat and radiant warmth. The deep ochre colour of the walls – plastered with soil transported from Ghana – casts an amber glow upon the artworks and the rough texture absorbs light and muffles sound.

The Ghanaian pavilion, which can be found in the Artiglierie of the historic Arsenale, represents a historic moment for Ghana: ‘We have arrived,’ concludes the Honorable Catherine Afeku, Minister of Tourism, Arts and Culture for Ghana

Information

Ghana's national pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale is on view from 11 May to 24 November 2019. ‘Ghana Freedom’ will travel from Venice to Accra after the Biennale. For more information, visit the Biennale website

On the edge of San Pedro Creek in San Antonio, southern Texas, Ruby City rises. The 930 sq m art centre, clad in crimson-coloured precast concrete, is the city’s latest cultural venue, designed by Adjaye Associates in partnership with local firm, Alamo Architects.

The project has been a long time coming; it was conceived 12 years ago by the late art collector and philanthropist, Linda Pace, who sketched her idea for the project after waking from a dream. Much has changed since Pace scrawled down a sparkling, turreted building, but the colour emphatically remains; so much so that it gives the project its name, Ruby City.

‘My goal was to translate Linda's idea into a building that will do justice to her legacy,' says Adjaye. ‘Linda had a clear vision for how the institution should be an inspirational space for the community and interact with its surroundings, drawing visitors into the jewel-like structure while connecting to the San Antonio landscape. The building creates a narrative journey through the space that allows the collection to be accessed in an organic and meaningful way.'

Ruby City’s skin uses a glass and mica aggregate made south of the border in Mexico City. At ground level, the concrete has been polished to create a smooth, tactile finish; three metres above, a coarser aggregate using shards of varying shades has been used.

Behind the building’s angular massing, Ruby City hosts three white walled galleries filled with light, courtesy of two pitched rooflights. The internal entrance and lobby, the latter doubling up as an auxiliary exhibition space, retain the reddish hue of the façade.

Despite not offering a shop or café, the museum is planning on allowing food trucks to the site, where they will set up shop in Chris Park, a one-acre swathe of public greenery adjacent the museum where patrons will also be able to bring picnics.

‘We are part of the vibrant arts district of San Antonio known as ‘Southtown’,' Kelly O’Connor, Head of Collections told Wallpaper*. ‘We are fortunate to be located adjacent to other art venues as well as local restaurants and coffee shops.’ Ruby city opens this October and will be free to enter.

INFORMATION

For more information, visit the Adjaye Associates website

Designing architecture exhibitions can be notoriously tricky. Attempting to represent the experience and impact of being in any particular building or interior, while in the constraints of an entirely different space, often thousands of miles away, is an elusive goal. Add to this the challenge of embedding exhibitions within a strong theoretical base, and curators are often faced with a tough task. The newly opened ‘David Adjaye: Making Memory' exhibition at London's Design Museum, successfully manages to avoid the common pitfalls, launching a succinct and to-the-point display that opens to the wider public from 2 February.

The show focuses on work by Sir David Adjaye and his London, New York and Accra-based architecture practice, Adjaye Associates, while examining the idea of the monument – a theme that, as the exhibition proves, has long been aligned with the studio's thought processes. Elaborating on ‘how architecture and form are used as storytelling devices', this showcase is informative and captivating, using clean design and an uncluttered language, while touching upon issues such as memory, experience and representation, and of course architecture's role within them.

‘The monument is no longer a representation, it is an experience of time and place that is available to everyone', says Adjaye. ‘Whether it’s for a nation, a race, a community, or a person, it is really used as a device to talk about the many things facing people across the planet. Democratisation does not mean that monuments cease to be relevant; it requires the monument to be transformed, so that it has an inbuilt openness and can be approached and understood from many points of view.'

The visitor's journey takes place through the lens of seven of the practice's key works – some completed, some in progress and some still in development stage. Included are the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington D.C, the new National Cathedral of Ghana in Accra; the UK Holocaust Memorial and Learning Centre in London (with Ron Arad Architects as Memorial Architect, and Gustafson Porter + Bowman as Landscape Architect); the Sclera Pavilion for London Design Festival 2008 (in collaboration with the American Hardwood Export Council); the Mass Extinction Memorial Observatory; the Gwangju River Reading Room in South Korea (in collaboration with the writer Taiye Selasi); and the first opportunity to see an ‘in-depth display' of the Coretta Scott King and Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial in Boston (with contributions by African-American artist Adam Pendleton and type designer David Reinfurt). 

There are drawings, photography and architectural models – perhaps as expected – but there's also a lot of welcome video documentation of Adjaye talking about the projects, as well as input from his creative collaborators on some of these projects. 

The show was designed by Adjaye Associates together with the Design Museum – perhaps a challenge in itself (one could argue that it requires some distance to engage with a subject with a fresh eye), but one that the studio responded to with flair, offering an exhibition that's truly in sync with its subject matter.

Information

‘David Adjaye: Making Memory' is on at the Design Museum in London until 05 May 2019. For more information visit the Adjaye Associates website and the Design Museum website

Address

Design Museum
224-238 Kensington High Street
London
W8 6AG

With the current boom of residential towers going up across New York City, the Big Apple is at the forefront of shaping what luxury living looks like today. The bar is being raised this week with today’s reveal of 130 William – a distinctive luxury building located in Lower Manhattan, designed by Sir David Adjaye. Rising up to approximately 800 feet tall and spanning 66 storeys, the residence is not only Adjaye’s first skyscraper, but his first tower in New York City as well.

Developed by the real estate company, Lightstone, 130 William will leave a striking mark on the already glittering downtown New York skyline. Instead of instituting a glass façade that typically accompanies buildings of this scale, Adjaye Associates looked to the city’s architectural past for inspiration. 130 William boasts a custom, hand-cast frontage – a contemporary spin on the classic stonework seen on historical buildings in Manhattan. A blend of textured surfaces and smooth, bronze detailing, the elegant façade is made all the more memorable thanks to a rhythm of large arched windows that also make a nod to industrial lofts that once filled the neighbourhood.

‘In defining the design for 130 William, I sought to celebrate New York City’s heritage of masonry architecture, referencing the historical architecture once pervasive upon one of the city’s earliest streets,’ says Adjaye, who also oversaw the interior design of the residences as well. ‘However, and more importantly, 130 William has been crafted to focus on the new possibilities of urban, vertical living.’

To this end, the tower’s 244 residences, which range from studios to four-bedroom apartments and include penthouses on its ten topmost residential floors, are accompanied by an unprecedented collection of lifestyle and wellness amenities that spreads over 20,000 square feet. The health club comes equipped with an infinity pool, cold and hot plunge pools, massage rooms, a fitness centre, a yoga studio and a basketball court. Meanwhile, other leisure pursuits are provided for by the IMAX movie theatre, golf simulator, resident’s club lounge and game room, the chef’s kitchen and private dining facilities, children’s activity centre, pet spa, and the private observatory roof deck located at the pinnacle of the building. Little it seems, has been left overlooked.

Inside the residences, fine materials such as wide planks of white oak flooring, burnished bronze fixtures and hardware, and a hand-selected range of textured Spanish and Italian marbles give a sophisticated, yet craft-inspired finish. Other notable features include Gaggeneau appliances and Pedini millwork cabinetry in the kitchens, and soaking tubs and custom Adjaye-designed medicine cabinets in the master bathrooms.

At the building’s base, a public plaza park, also designed by Adjaye, and extensive retail space will ensure the address becomes a nucleus of new activity in the neighbourhood. Realised in collaboration with local architects Hill West, the building is scheduled to complete in 2020.

INFORMATION

For more information visit the Adjaye Associates’ website

Located on the first three levels of a Midtown Manhattan’s 928 8th Avenue, Adjaye Associates’ Spyscape is part museum and part interactive funhouse, showcasing the espionage world’s stories, tools and characters and offering visitor challenges that range from surveillance skills to special ops training.

Adjaye, which developed Spyscape’s architectural, exhibition, and even fixture design, worked closely with advisors like museum officials, former intelligence agency directors, and ex-hackers, creating a complex that immerses you in the mystery, intrigue, smarts, and subterfuge of spying.

The multi-level museum’s labyrinthine exhibition spaces are organized around seven spy-related themes, including encryption, surveillance, deception and hacking. Within each you meet key characters related to the subject (like Robert Hanson, a notorious mole for the KGB, and Virginia Hall, the one-legged spy who fled the Nazis over the Pyrenees), peruse artifacts (like dominoes with tools hidden inside, spy plane cameras, and code-protecting Enigma Machines from WWII), and take part in a related skill challenge (like lie detection and interrogation practice and the Special Ops laser tunnel, in which you duck and jump over laser beams to prove your dexterity.)

Visitors each receive an identity band, tracking their progress, and their experience ends with a debrief, analyzing their skillset and suggesting what spy-related roles they could hold.

Until you reach that debrief you advance from room to room, inundated with visual stimuli intended to overwhelm you, intrigue you, make you feel watched, and hint at what’s to come, like cuts between floors, peeks into other galleries, translucent screens, smoked glass windows and doors, and varied lighting, ranging from flashing LEDs to traditional museum lighting. Sinister, shadowy finishes and fixtures include dark fiber cement walls, gray acoustic paneling, stainless steel kiosks, and reflective black linoleum and polished concrete floors, sometimes imbedded with LEDs.

A few galleries stand alone, like a raised timber viewing platform and the surveillance pavilion, a weathered steel drum filled with programmable surveillance technology. The museum also holds event spaces, offices, a bookstore, and, of course, a spy gift shop.

‘It’s a very different take on what a museum is,’ says Adjaye Associates’ Josh Ellman. ‘People are engaged rather than just consuming information passively.’ The firm’s kinetic, foreboding, engrossing design, and the sense that you’re being tracked, drive home the chilling point that espionage these days isn’t just limited to spies. Corporations, governments, and just about everyone else is doing it too.

‘We show how the world of espionage is all around you,’ notes Shelby Prichard, Spyscape’s US chief of staff.

INFORMATION

For more information, visit the David Adjaye Associates website and the Spyscape website

ADDRESS

Spyscape
928 8th Ave
New York
NY 10019
USA

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Sir David Adjaye’s African American museum scooped the biggest prize at the Beazley Design Awards, winning both the overall Design of the Year and crowned this year’s architecture category victor. It's the tenth year of the Design Museum’s Beazley Designs of the Year and the second year the awards ceremony was held in the museum's new South Kensington home. Unfortunately Adjaye was unable to attend the ceremony, but he left a humbling video of acceptable, thanking those who contributed to the project.

A multi-category prize for design that ‘promotes or delivers change, enables access, extends design practice or captures the spirit of the year’ the Beazley Design Awards has a wide remit, but this is handily distilled into six clear-cut categories: architecture, digital, fashion, graphics, product and transport. This year's esteemed panel includes David Rowan (chair of the jury and editor-at-large of Wired UK); fashion designer Ozwald Boateng; Marcus Engman (design manager of IKEA Range and Supply); typesetter and designer Margaret Calvert; AL_A principal/founder Amanda Levete; Professor Gerry McGovern (chief design officer at JLR); and Michael Tchao (VP product marketing at Apple).

As ever, this year’s recipients have touched on themes of politics, social and physical mobility, race and future-proof design processes. Take the digital category, which a host of designers and engineers from US furniture-maker Steelcase and the MIT Self-Assembly Lab (in collaboration with Swiss product designer Christophe Guberan) won for ‘Rapid Liquid Printing’. Ostensibly a new-fangled 3D printing technique, RLP uses gel suspension to create large-scale custom projects; circumventing the limitations of regular 3D-printing (those being speed and size) to create furniture-scale pieces from industrial grade materials in moments.

‘Fractured Lands’ – the winner of this year’s graphics category – is a single, 42,000-word longform piece on the fracturing of the Arab world (from the invasion of Iraq in 2003 to the contemporary existence of ISIS and the subsequent drift of refugees from the region), that appeared in The New York Times Magazine last August. Written by Scott Anderson and shot by Paolo Pellegrin (though the design is credited to Jake Silverstein, Gail Bichler and Matt Willey, the NYTM’s editor-in-chief, design director and art director, respectively), the piece eschews the visual histrionics increasingly common to digital longform, instead embellishing the extensive text with an austere aesthetic fitting of the subject.

Bird’s-eye view of Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture by Adjaye Associates in Washington DC, the architecture and overall winner

Less sombre is Graviky Labs’ AIR-INK: the first commercially available pigments and inks made from air pollution, and the winner of the product category. The fashion category, meanwhile, has been won by a team at Nike for its single-layer, high performance Pro Hijab – a potential game changer for Muslim sportspeople (and inspired by Sarah Attar’s appearance for Saudi Arabia at the 2012 Olympics).

A group of designers from the Swiss Federal Institute for Technology took the transport award for Scewo. A stairclimbing wheelchair that will allow its differently abled users to reach hitherto inaccessible locations – by way of retractable rubber tracks – it also features a set of ancillary wheels that can raise the chair up to standing eye height, for more level engagement (literally and figuratively).

But the main accolade – the overall Design of the Year and this year’s architecture category victor – goes to Adjaye Associates, The Freelon Group, Davis Brody Ben and SmithGroupJJR for the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. Located in Washington, DC, Sir David Adjaye’s 310,000-sq-ft instant-classic houses galleries, theatres, admin spaces and collection storage, as well as directly referencing African American history through its filigree cladding. Inaugurated by President Obama in September 2016, the Design Museum describes the museum as a ‘long-awaited symbol for the African American contribution to the nation’s history and identity’.

‘Not only is this a striking and already iconic structure at the heart of America’s capital, but it's the realisation of an entire century of planning, rejection, political opposition and finally collaborative execution,’ says judge David Rowan of the decision. ‘But the building… is also a powerful reminder that design enables a diverse conversation and can challenge the dominant political discourse. We felt that, in the context of today’s strident American debate on race and identity, Adjaye’s achievement represented optimism.’ It’s a more than worthy winner.

‘Some day,’ the Design Museum add, somewhat more sassily, ‘the other museums will be showing this stuff.’

Sir David Adjaye, who couldn’t be present at the award ceremony at the Design Museum, left this video message. Produced by Red Bee

Information

The shortlisted Beazley Designs of the Year are on view until 28 January 2018. For more information, visit the Design Museum website

Address

Design Museum
224-238 Kensington High Street
London W8 6AG

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The Africa Architecture Awards received over 300 entries from 32 African countries for its inaugural edition. Taking place on the rooftop of the new Thomas Heatherwick-designed Zeitz MOCAA in Cape Town, the ceremony was a celebration of the first pan-African architecture awards heralding a creative wave of onstruction and design across the continent.

The Umkhumbane Museum, in South Africa and designed by Choromanski Architects, won the Grand Prix prize, selected by the jury because the project represented the future of African architecture. Receiving a bronze trophy, final category winners included projects by CEICA (Angola), Aissata Balde, and Ogundare Olawale Israel, both from the Graduate School of Architecture, University of Johannesburg.

The awards, which were founded and funded by construction industry innovator Saint-Gobain, have taken two years of preparation and stimulated many conversations about African architecture along the way, thanks to a stellar steering panel headed by professor Lesley Lokko, ambassador Phill Mashabane, advisor Zahira Asmal, and patron Sir David Adjaye and many architects.

‘The Africa Architecture Awards are very critical. Now is the time to promote excellence and best practice on the continent,’ said Adjaye. ‘The awards are particularly important because this is the moment that a lot is happening on the continent in terms of development, in terms of the architecture that’s being produced.’

INFORMATION

For more information, visit the African Architecture Awards website

Since founding his practice in 2000, David Adjaye has dabbled in furniture design, creating seating for Moroso and Knoll. But the speaker he developed in collaboration with New York-based audio company Master & Dynamic, now realised in a new black concrete complexion, was a complete departure, and the first time that his musical passion has manifested in a physical product.

Adjaye knows a thing or two about how sound should work in a space. For the British-Ghanaian architect’s ‘Music for Architecture’ collaboration with his DJ brother, Peter, the pair worked together on musical accompaniments to many of the Adjaye’s works. And one doesn’t get to design the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington DC, the Aïshti Foundation in Beirut, retail spaces for the likes of Proenza Schouler, Valextra and Roksanda Ilincic, as well as impressive private residences all over the world without more than a passing understanding of acoustics.

‘I have been a fan of architecture and design my whole life,’ says entrepreneur Jonathan Levine, who launched Master & Dynamic in 2014. ‘I wanted to study architecture and was talked out of it, but I have always maintained a love of design and architectural material.’ This love shows in the nostalgic yet contemporary design of the brand’s headphones, its use of finely crafted materials (leather and aluminium) and the superb sound delivered by its products (Frank Ocean, Paul McCartney and Lin-Manuel Miranda are fans).

Levine and Adjaye bonded over a shared love of heft. ‘It’s important to me that all of our products should have some sort of heft and weight,’ says Levine. And architectural heft has long been a quality of Adjaye’s output – a book chronicling his career, published in 2015, was titled Form, Heft, Material. Together, they conceived a sculptural concrete speaker that is part architectural expression, part technological feat.

For the ‘MA770’, as it is known, Adjaye created a light, sinuous shape with a curious triangular back. ‘We introduced a new geometry of sound,’ he says. From its flat front panel, the speaker appears very simple, but the faceted back adds intrigue to the 16kg model. ‘By using triangles we introduced this extraordinary, gentle curve, which creates a sense of gravity in the form,’ adds Adjaye. ‘It’s a beautiful old concept – the notion that richness isn’t necessarily on the outside, but is about you and your intimacy and discovery.’

For Levine, the material was key. ‘I had always envisioned doing a speaker made of concrete,’ he says, but he had been told it couldn’t be done, in terms of both acoustics and manufacturing. He persevered until his team of engineers found the perfect material solution, a polymer with excellent acoustic qualities. ‘This material provides a number of benefits, such as increased dampening, reduced resonance from the enclosure, a purer sound and added durability,’ says Adjaye. Concrete’s dampening qualities are five times better than wood and ten times better than plastic.

The speaker has other impressive features that demonstrate innovative use of materials, such as titanium tweeter domes, woven Kevlar woofers and diamond-cut aluminium controls. An etched steel grille covers the woofers, snapping onto the front via magnets hidden behind the concrete.

The entire development process took just over a year – an impressive turnaround that Levine credits to Adjaye’s skill. ‘David has an innate but very experience driven knowledge of how forms work,’ says Levine. The architect found the experience a rewarding one. ‘Small scale allows me to test out ideas with some immediacy,’ he says. ‘It’s a great contrast to my architectural work, which unfolds across many years. I have a real delight in the samples, the mock-ups and the sketches.

‘What I find fascinating is that a speaker can be everywhere and used by everyone, unthinkingly, in their daily lives – it is a background,’ says Adjaye. ‘There is something very powerful and very rewarding about that.’

A version of this article originally featured in the May 2017 issue of Wallpaper* (W*218)

INFORMATION

For more information, visit the Master & Dynamic website and the David Adjaye website

Sir David Adjaye’s new book Constructed Narratives, edited by Peter Allison and published by Lars Müller, is an informal manifesto of the architect’s design principles and architectural approach, reflecting on almost 25 years of work.

Following the completion of Washington's Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture (SNMAAHC) in September 2016, and then receiving a knighthood this year, the book marks a poignant moment in time for the mid-career architect.

‘Making this book helped me to organise my approach and philosophy in a much more formal way than I had ever done previously,’ says Adjaye.

‘In the past, it had been a guiding ethos for my practice, but drawing out the themes for this book has made me even more determined to remain resolute in my dedication to responsiveness, to architecture that demonstrates empathy with its users and its surroundings, and to innovating typologies that can guide our cities into the future,’ he says.

Through case studies and essays, the book connects the dots between the architectural shapes and styles that Adjaye has constructed across the world, from New York to London and Beirut, formulating a philosophy in the shape of a constellation, covering urban design, geography and various architectural typologies.

Sparking this reflective approach to his career was the completion of his ‘largest and most complex project’, the SNMAAHC.

‘The museum was the culmination of eight years of work, but in many ways it felt like the culmination of the past 15 years, since I set up my office. I felt it provided a natural pivot point in my practice... like the proper close to a previous chapter, and the exciting launch pad for the next,’ says Adjaye.

Occupying the last remaining space on Washington’s National Mall, the SNMAAHC was a milestone for Adjaye and his retrospective narrative reads as if it was destined for him. Maybe it was.

‘My ideal public building has a square plan and is visible from all sides,’ he states in the book, in an essay on public architecture. Square buildings, he continues, are not as common as you would think – illustrating his reflection with examples drawn from architectural history, from the Great Mosque of Cordoba to Le Corbusier’s Palace of Assembly in Chandigarh, Louis Kahn’s Jewish Community Centre and the cultural examples of mandalas and Persian gardens.

Eloquently communicated, Adjaye’s ideas have a sense of determination that doesn’t shy away from idealism and rhetoric, yet he is never brusque or demanding, only measured and hopeful. The SNMAAHC culminates his architectural philosophy in one magnificent statement.

The dark earth-coloured, lightweight facade of bronze cladding achieves balance between form and density. It is powerful yet approachable. Adjaye traces his use of dark exteriority to his first building, Elektra House (2000), built with dark brown resin-coated plywood. ‘This was when I started thinking about building forms as voids,’ he writes in the essay ‘Toward Black’.

He used different types of darkness in the Bernie Grant Arts Centre (2002–2007), building with black clad ceramic tiles, dark brown corrugated sheet and brown cement fibre board to distinguish different parts of the project.

At Rivington Place (2007) he contrasted black precast concrete cladding with the ochres, oranges and greys of Georgian brickwork. ‘When you are in the street, it is an imposing building that is in retreat. I attribute this to the light absorbing qualities of the dark facades; it is both a strong form and a relaxed form,’ he writes – which could also be said of the SNMAAHC.

Cemented in the foundations of this building, Adjaye’s design philosophy is configured in Constructed Narratives by reflecting back over the past. Yet, the satisfaction of finishing the last page of a great book, closing the cover and placing it down, is always followed by a new adventure.

INFORMATION

Constructed Narratives, by David Adjaye, edited by Peter Allison, €45. Published by Lars Müller. For more information, visit the publisher's website

The word 'Thames' comes from the Latin 'Tamesis', meaning 'dark'. Hannah Rothschild, chair of The Illuminated River Trust, has set about transforming the murky sliver that winds its way though the capital, into a vibrant, light-flooded public installation.

Back in July, The Illuminated River competition challenged architects and artists to decorate central London's 17 iconic bridges with dazzling, permanent light works. It's where 'art, design and technology meet', Rothschild explains. A total of 105 submissions were received from around the world, whittled down to the six shortlisted entries now on display at the Southbank Centre.

To impress the distinguished panel of judges, it seems collaborative working was a must – the more interdisciplinary, international and unexpected the better. Adjaye Associates' group offering features ideas from 17 world-renowned artists, including Philippe Parreno, Larry Bell and Chris Ofili; while Diller Scofidio + Renfro's Synchronising the City project enlists the help of Arup and Oliver Beer among others.

These impressive collaborations have spawned some predictably brilliant concepts. Sam Jacob Studio and Simon Heijdens' The Thames Nocturne forms a ribbon of light connecting Chelsea to Wapping – a live data feed reads the ripples in the Thames' surface water, choreographing the light show. Meanwhile, Amanda Levete's design studio AL_A relies upon the movements of the moon for its installation. When the tide is low, the bridges' underbellies are exposed, flooded in light. When the tide is high, light rises up, bathing their elevations.

Although the complex, hard-won proposals are now in and awaiting final judgement on 8 December, Rothschild suggests that the hard work is only just beginning. Despite the Mayor of London Sadiq Kahn's full support, and £10 million already raised, there's a few hefty hurdles remaining – not to mention a further £10 million required to make the project a reality. All of the funding is expected to come from corporate or charitable donations, and Rothschild avows that 'absolutely no funding will come from the public purse'. With her evident passion, along with all those on team Thames (including Lord Rothschild, artist Michael Craig Martin, and Dame Julia Peyton-Jones), we're sure 'the dark one', as our great river has become known, won't be so for long. Rothschild says, 'The Thames is our liquid history and we must reclaim it.'

Watch an overview of Adjaye Associates’ Blurring Bounderies above

INFORMATION
’The Illuminated River’ is on view at the Southbank Centre until 29 November. For more information, visit the Illuminated River website

ADDRESS

Southbank Centre
Belvedere Road
London SE1 8XX

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The Illuminated River competition is a pioneering design challenge set to transform London's historic bridges. Headed up by Hannah Rothschild, The Illuminated River Trust has been busy compiling a star-studded shortlist of six ambitious proposals that will decorate the 17 bridges with new lighting designs.

Architect David Adjaye took a collaborative approach for his entry – 'Blurring Boundaries' – enlisting the help of 17 artists, including Philippe Parreno, Richard Wood, Doug Aitken, Jeremy Deller and Tomás Saraceno. They were each invited to develop a lighting concept for a different bridge, with predictably striking results.

The six shortlisted proposals are on display until 29 November at the Southbank Centre – the ideal venue to showcase the designs, given its promixity to the edge of the Thames. The winning project will be announced on 8 December.

At first glance, you’d struggle to spot many similarities between Sir Kenneth Grange and Bethan Laura Wood. He’s the classically styled godfather of British modernism, renowned for designing some of the most iconic industrial products of the past 50 years; she’s a vivacious princess of 21st-century pop design, typically seen in multicoloured make-up and clothes that complement her experimental furniture, products and set designs. But one thing the pair do have in common is a fondness for unusual footwear. ‘Kenneth always has really good shoes,’ says Wood, resplendent in a pair of iridescent brogues. Not to be outdone, Grange has dug out a pair of red and yellow boots with padded wings that he bought at the Mr Freedom store on the King’s Road in the 1960s. ‘These are from my flashy dresser years,’ he recalls. ‘For me, dressing up is part of a now-hidden persona.’ Another commonality, which has brought them together at Grange’s Hampstead home for this photoshoot, is the news that they are both among the recipients of this year’s prestigious London Design Medal. Grange is receiving the Johnson Tiles Lifetime Achievement award in recognition of a career spanning more than six decades, while Wood will pick up the Swarovski Emerging Talent Medal.

This morning (20 September) it was revelaed that alongside Wood and Grange, architect David Adjaye has won the Panerai London Design Medal, and Dutch artist Daan Roosegaarde the Airbnb Design Innovation Medal, too. Adjaye, Wood and Roosegaarde celebrated their wins at a moderated talk with Wallpaper* Editor-in-Chief Tony Chambers in the same space – Exchange Square, Broadgate – which will showcase the work of the medal winners during the London Design Festival.

Now in its tenth year, the prize celebrates ‘the achievements of designers who are making or who have made a significant difference to our lives through innovation, originality and imagination’, with past winners including Zaha Hadid, Marc Newson and Dieter Rams.

Taking over the highest honour from Edward Barber & Jay Osgerby from last year, architect David Adjaye is being honoured with the Panerai London Design Medal for his distinguished career and consistent design excellence. The Wallpaper* Design Awards 2016 judge and world renowned architect was revered by the judges as 'an inpiration for the younger generation,' citing his soon-to-be-unveiled project in Washington, the National Museum of African American History and Culture, as a prime example of the qualities which have earnt him said title. Previous winners of this accolade include Ronan & Erwan Bouroullec, Peter Saville and Thomas Heatherwick.

Celebrating entrepreneurship, the Airbnb Design Innovation Medal champions individuals whose buisiness development and success lies in outstanding design. Studio Roosegaarde, the social design lab of Dutch artist Daan Roosegaarde, explores the interaction between people, technology and space, most notably with his Smog Free Project, which saw him create the world's largest smog vacuum cleaner and thus this notable prize.

Grange, who was knighted in 2013, says the recognition he received serves as encouragement to others, while Wood claims the medal will help boost her own confidence, and the confidence of potential industrial partners. ‘Of course, there’s an ego-stroking part to it,’ she admits, ‘but I think it helps brands have confidence in the work of young designers when we’re given this approval from within the industry.’

The shoot featured in the October issue of Wallpaper* gave the pair a chance to reminisce about their early encounters at London’s Royal College of Art (RCA), where Grange is a visiting professor and Wood was a student from 2007 to 2009. ‘He has an amazing amount of knowledge and skill to pass on,’ says Wood, who studied on the RCA’s MA Product Design platform under the tutelage of Martino Gamper and Jurgen Bey. ‘When you’re around someone who has had such a long and productive career, you learn a lot from every conversation.’

After graduating, Wood set out on a path that has seen her undertake residencies with London’s Design Museum and W Hotel Mexico City, as well as collaborating with artisanal producers on predominantly limited series or batch-manufactured objects that utilise materials as diverse as wood laminate, hand-blown glass and appliqué upholstery. It’s a contrasting approach to the function-led philosophy espoused by Grange, but one that the young designer confidently claims reflects her personal interests.

‘I feel that I’m very much of my time,’ Wood asserts. ‘The way I’ve been able to approach design comes from a period which is very different to when Kenneth started out. Like lots of creative industries, design changes over time and in response to cultural movements, so even though my focus is not on industrial production, I like to think that I’m contributing something in my own way.’

Grange, meanwhile, continues to work on the sort of products that helped him become one of the most respected and decorated designers of his generation. Most of us have at come into contact with his designs, which include cameras for Kodak, kitchen mixers for Kenwood, razors for Wilkinson Sword and pens for Parker, as well as the UK’s first parking meters, the InterCity 125 high-speed train for British Rail, and the 1997 TX1 taxi.

Looking back on this stellar career and all it has encompassed, Grange feels particularly satisfied with the role he’s performed as an educator. As well as teaching at the RCA, he also mentored youngsters during his time as an employer and manager at his own studio and at Pentagram, the consultancy he co-founded in London in 1972. He tries to keep his key message simple, telling students to identify the area where they feel they can make the biggest contribution to society.

‘There is a huge spectrum of design, spanning from the absolutely useless to the purely functional,’ adds Grange. ‘But I think the approach should be to focus on improving whatever it is you’re entrusted with.’

Another subject of consensus between the two designers is their appreciation of the role the media plays in helping promote awareness of the discipline and its value within modern society. Grange, whose work has featured regularly in Wallpaper* during the past 20 years, quips that it is ‘probably the most respected magazine that includes people like us in it’, but remains disappointed that ‘we haven’t succeeded in getting design to be taken seriously in the popular media’.

Wood’s participation in the Wallpaper* Handmade exhibition, staged at Milan’s Design Week in 2013, enabled her to develop a prototype of the laminate and plywood ‘Play Time’ tables, and she feels the magazine has played a key role in her evolution. ‘I bought Wallpaper* even before I was a student,’ she recalls, ‘so it’s been with me for as long as I’ve been interested in design and has really supported me throughout my career.’

The divergence in the pair’s priorities comes to the fore when they talk about the future. ‘I’m just trying to stay on the twig,’ jokes Grange, who in fact is busy in his role as creative director for lighting brand Anglepoise and is working on a furniture collection, in addition to teaching at the RCA.

Wood, meanwhile, is preparing to install window sets featuring oversized fruits that she designed and built for two of Hermès’ European flagship stores, while working on several projects that will be exhibited during the London Design Festival. Asked about her longer-term ambitions, she pauses before saying, ‘I just hope I can live as long and be as successful at following my own path as Kenneth has been. That’s the dream.’

Also featured in the October 2016 issue of Wallpaper* (W*211)

INFORMATION

Work from the winners will be showcased in the British Land Celebration of Design Exhibition through to 25 September. For more information visit the website

ADDRESS

British Land Celebration of Design
Exchange Square, Broadgate
London EC2A 2BQ

View Google Maps

In advance of its official opening on 24 September, the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) in Washington, DC, held a special preview day for the press on 14 September. For most of the several hundred attendees, it was the first chance to look inside the 400,000-sq-ft building, designed by a consortium of firms helmed by David Adjaye and Philip Freelon.

Fulfilling an idea that dates back to the early 1900s, but has met political opposition along the way, the museum honors the achievements of African Americans while telling the 'unvarnished truth', in the phrasing of one curator, about their oppression. The new museum was given the last buildable spot on the National Mall, Washington’s monumental core.

At the preview, David Skorton, secretary of the Smithsonian, and Lonnie Bunch, the museum’s director, addressed a full-to-capacity house in the Oprah Winfrey Theater (the TV personality was a major donor). 'We felt it was crucial to craft a museum that would help America remember and confront its tortured racial past,' Bunch said. 'But, it also had to find the joy, the hope, the resiliency, the spirituality, that was embedded in this community. The goal was to find that tension.'

That tension plays out in the sequence of galleries. They begin underground, telling the story of slavery and struggle in dark, compressed spaces, and through exhibits such as a slave auction block, a slave cabin from South Carolina, and a shawl and hymnal that belonged to abolitionist Harriet Tubman. Switchbacking ramps and a twisting black staircase lead up to the building’s main lobby. Above this rise two more gallery levels celebrating African American culture and institutions. Here, visitors can see Chuck Berry’s cherry-red Cadillac and Muhammad Ali’s boxing gear, or explore work by black visual artists.

Wrapping the upper levels is the filigreed 'corona', the signature design element of the museum, its form inspired by the tiered crowns found in Yoruban sculpture. The corona is composed of more than 3,000 aluminum panels with a PVDF coating, and it received close attention from the architects, as well as Washington’s powerful design-review boards.

'I was obsessed with this detail,' Adjaye says. '[The coating] is the same luminosity as bronze. It reflects and absorbs light exactly the way bronze does.' On the highly symbolic national landscape of the Mall, Adjaye says, there was no option but to get it just right. 'There was an understanding that this was in the nation’s capital, it was going to be looked at by everyone and it had to be perfect.'

President Obama (who gets his own exhibit case inside) will make a dedication to the museum on the opening weekend, and The Roots and other acts will play at a free music festival. Public interest is high: passes were snapped up so quickly that the museum extended its hours and issued more. Clearly, says Freelon, 'there was a pent-up demand for this sort of cultural institution on a national scale'.

INFORMATION

For more information, visit David Adjaye’s website

Photography: Alan Karchmer

The annual Wallpaper* Architects Directory was conceived in 2000 as the ultimate little black book of new architectural talent, in an effort to both celebrate and map out the world’s best young practices, year-by-year, spanning countries and continents; and what a journey has it been.

We’ve so far featured over 450 practices from all continents (OK, maybe not Antarctica – yet) and photographed over 100 of them in the most amazing architectural sites across the world, from Tokyo’s Shibuya Station by Tadao Ando, to Diller Scofidio and Renfro’s Lincoln Centre project, Richard Rogers’ Heathrow T5, the Neues Gallery in Berlin by David Chipperfield and the Shard in London, by Renzo Piano.

Not that the Architects Directory was the first time we supported budding talent. Leading names such as David Adjaye, Seth Stein, UNStudio and MVRD, all made an early, pre-2000 appearance in the pages of Wallpaper*.

Nurturing emerging practices and seeing them grow into global creative brands has been an exciting story in itself – and there’s been a lot of that. Our ever-growing roster includes now-internationally acclaimed names, such as Allied Works, Brian McKay-Lyons, Claesson Koivisto Rune, Niall McLaughlin, Sean Godsell and Grafton Architects.

For more on the Wallpaper* Architects Directory in our 20th anniversary October 2016 issue (w* 211)

dRMM 
Featured in 2001
Alex de Rijke, Philip Marsh and Sadie Morgan founded dRMM in London in 1995 and have been prolific, working with equal ease on projects of all scales, from large housing projects to smaller ones, such as artist Richard Wood’s home and studio, WoodBlock House (pictured here). Their innovative and socially relevant approach is renowned.

Atelier Oi 
Featured in 2004
Founded in 1990 in Switzerland by Aurel Aebi, Armand Louis and Patrick Reymond, Atelier Oï is a multidisciplinary firm that blurs the boundaries of design; its body of work features a diverse bounty of products, set design, architecture and interiors, such as stores for Rimowa and Pringle of Scotland.

Sean Godsell
Featured in 2001
Australian architect Sean Godsell is revered for projects like the St Andrews Beach house (pictured here) and RMIT Design Hub. He applies his minimalist, refined aesthetic to residential and commercial structures alike, keeping in touch with his country’s climatic characteristics and using a modern material palette - inspired by its locality - to perfection

Deborah Berke 
Featured in 2002
Apart from leading her namesake New York-based firm, Deborah Berke has also just kicked off her time as the Dean of the Yale School of Architecture. Her prestigious practice’s work includes the Bard College Conservatory of Museum and interiors for 432 Park Avenue in New York

Claesson Koivisto Rune
Featured in 2000
Swedish firm Claesson Koivisto Rune founded by Mårten Claesson, Eero Koivisto and Ola Rune in 1995, started off as an architecture firm, but evolved into a successful multidisciplinary uber-practice, experimenting with furniture, textiles, and even confectionery. Their wide-reaching skill set soon propelled them to international design stardom.

MAD Architects 
Featured in 2007
MAD Architects, established in China in 2004 by Ma Yansong, started small but quickly transformed into a global brand, becoming one of the country’s leading firms. MAD is behind some of the world’s most striking structures, such as the Harbin Opera House (pictured here). 

Brian MacKay Lyons 
Featured in 2002
Brian MacKay-Lyons – currently the co-head of MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple Architects together with Talbot Sweetapple – is based in Halifax, Canada. The practice works on an array of cultural, commercial and, most notably, residential projects, such as the Sliding House and the recently completed Enough House on MacKay Lyons’ own famous farm and education project, Shobac

Grafton Architects
Featured in 2000
Grafton Architects, founded by directors Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara in 1972 are now globally acknowledged for their refined, contemporary style. The firm has a number of exhibition participations and education projects under their belt, such as the modern and minimalist Luigi Bocconi University building in Milan. 

Allied Works
Featured in 2002
Allied Works, the 40-person practice led by Brad Cloepfil, has offices in Portland, Oregon and New York City. They first graced our pages in 2002 but the firm quickly grew since, working on a roster of impressive projects. Key completions include the Sun Valley Residence (pictured here) and the Museum of Arts and Design in New York

Tuckey Design
Featured in 2006
A context-sensitive approach sits at the heart of all Jonathan Tuckey projects. Over the years, the designer has perfected the art of transforming historic buildings into chic, contemporary spaces. With offices in London and Andermatt, Switzerland, the firm is renowned for its seamless weaving of old and new. 

David Adjaye
Featured in 1997
With offices in London, New York and Accra, David Adjaye’s firm has acquired international prestige through a diverse range of projects. Works such as the Aishti Foundation in Beirut (pictured here) and the Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington – about to open its doors this month – are a case in point of Adjaye’s skilful architecture.

UNStudio
Featured in 1999
Amsterdam-based UNStudio’s early work includes architecture classics such as Mobius House and the Erasmus Bridge (pictured here). Not that directors Ben Van Berkell and Caroline Bos rested on their laurels after that. The firm is now working internationally and has recently expanded with three additional offices in China. 

MVRDV
Featured in 1999
MVRDV, founded in 1993 in the Netherlands by Winy Maas, Jacob van Rijs and Nathalie de Vries, made a splash with early work such as the WOZOCO housing complex. They since developed into a global super-practice, applying their unique approach to offerings such as their impressive Rotterdam Market Hall, located in Rotterdam (pictured here). 

Seth Stein
Featured in 1998
Award-winning architect Seth Stein is a master of minimalism, combining a pared down approach with contemporary flair and luxurious materials. While best known for one-off houses in stunning rural settings or modern urban boltholes, his recently completed equestrian centre near Melbourne highlights the firm’s far-reaching skills. 

The Tanzania-born, London-based architect David Adjaye is a Wallpaper* favourite, not least because he was a judge for our 2016 Design Awards. He's a multifaceted practitioner who thinks like a conceptual artist, creating structures bristling with meaning and subtle geo-cultural references.

A new project, developed in collaboration with Adjaye's brother Peter – aka composer, DJ and recording artist AJ Kwame – delves deeper still into the interstitial realms between 21st century psychogeography and music.

Released this month by The Vinyl Factory and Music for Architecture, Dialogues is a limited edition collection of sonic explorations into David's architectural work. Different genres of music have always been inextricably tied to and redolent of the landscapes they developed in. But, outside of the fields of musique concrète and field recording, it's rare to hear an artist engage with the built landscape on a micro-level, attempting to express the tactile and conceptual nature of architecture in a medium as fundamentally intangible as sound.

Each of Peter's compositions is a direct response to one of David's buildings. 'What Peter does is "sound architecture",' David explains of the process. 'I give Peter a project and ask him to react. Architecture is a narrative. This project is like a DNA experiment. There’s a construction.'

Projects of this kind often err towards abstracted musical expression – noise, drone, Radiophonic-style soundscaping – but Peter plays fast and loose, incorporating cinematic string sections, 90s-style jazzy breaks and knowingly ersatz references to the musical vernacular of the countries some of these buildings are located in, or draw from. Still, it's the less conventional tracks that work best.

Take that written for Adjaye's and Olafur Eliasson's 'Your Black Horizon' pavilion at the 2005 Venice Biennale – a four minute sketch of lightly delayed cello, conceived as a musical response to an installation that 'takes its inspiration from the narrow light source that pervades the centre of the pavilion, which then goes through the cycle of the light spectrum as the narrow slits cut your viewpoint to the light source'. (Peter has supplied a detailed text response to accompany each track.)

Or 'Reflections of a Golden Dream', written for the Stephen Lawrence Centre in Deptford. Comprising banks of sombre string, a few synthetic drones and spare percussive clacks, it simultaneously evokes the inherent melancholy of the building, while also making manifest in sound the building's expansive glass panes, adorned with patterns by artist Chris Ofili.

Elsewhere, Peter responds to projects as diverse as The Upper Room (a wooden cubicle created for Ofili for a 2007 Tate Britain show); the Ideas Store in Whitechapel, which features a dreamy smorgasbord of lilting flutes, tabla and percussion; and David's spectacular wooden 'Genesis Pavilion', created for Design Miami 2011.

For this latter piece, Peter was asked to compose a soundscape that pavilion viewers could act with via a QR code on their phones. The track segues seamlessly from primordial field recording, through quirky filmic vocal passages and onto a more percussive, sinister finale.

'Architecture can also be expressed as a kind of movement (of light, sound, people…),' Peter explains, and the record 'is about how you can represent this fluidity, to bring it alive and create an immersive whole-body experience.'

Dialogues is an intriguing and highly original collection, affording Adjaye’s practice – already concerned with the human condition – an even greater emotional resonance.

INFORMATION

Dialogues, by Peter Adjaye and David Adjaye, £50, on Music for Architecture and The Vinyl Factory. For more information and ordering, visit The Vinyl Factory's website

For architect David Adjaye, 2015 was a banner year. In addition to putting the finishing touches to career-topping works, such as the Aïshti Foundation in Beirut (W*200) and the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington DC, he enjoyed rave reviews for the retrospective exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago (with the help of Munich’s Haus der Kunst). 

But the invitation to join our judging panel was as much a recognition of the mark he has made in his field since first opening his office in 1994 as this annus mirabilis. 

Much is made of Adjaye’s expert use of different materials in the skin of buildings. But he is more concerned with developing a deep understanding of a building’s purpose as defined by its location, and the social and historical implications of his design. ‘All my choices,’ he says, ‘offer insight into how one might invest in culture, history, the built environment and beyond with a rigour that achieves enrichment, edification and beauty. This quest is at the heart of my practice.’

His sense of mission also informed his votes for our Judges’ Awards. He hails OMA’s Fondazione Prada for its ‘much needed injection of vitality into a neglected part of Milan. It avoids an obvious object statement. Instead, it opts for a subtle network of contemporary modifications and new insertions that knit together seamlessly.’

In the Best New Private House category, he praises Sameep Padora’s Lattice House for being ‘extraordinarily attuned to the climate and culture of India, using age-old techniques to contemporary effect. The system of wood lattice screens mediates the building environmentally, while also achieving privacy throughout the interior.’

For Designers of the Year, the Bouroullecs got Adjaye’s vote. ‘Their designs not only refine, but enrich the everyday experience, through an acute observation of it.’

An experienced product designer himself (his seating for Moroso launched in 2015), no doubt Adjaye has more up his sleeve in that field. Indeed, 2016 promises to be another landmark year for him. In addition to the Studio Museum in Harlem and the World Bank HQ in Dakar, he is working on a hospital in Rwanda and two mixed-use developments in London.

As originally featured in the February 2016 issue of Wallpaper* (W*203)

See the Design Awards 2016 in full – including our extra-special Judges' Awards - here

INFORMATION

Photography: Stefan Ruiz

With its exterior walls now in place and glinting above the National Mall – the green swathe at the heart of Washington, DC – the National Museum of African-American History and Culture (NMAAHC), our Design Awards 2016 Best Cultural Draw, is most of the way through its four-year build. But the vision it fulfills is much older than that.

In 1915, black veterans of the US Civil War proposed building a national memorial to African-American achievement. The idea languished for decades, and attempts to revive it in the 1970s and 80s met with political opposition. Finally, in 2003, the US Congress authorised a museum dedicated to the African-American experience, and assigned it the last buildable site on the Mall, close to the Washington Monument.

A competition in 2009 narrowed the museum’s possible designers down to just one: the Freelon Adjaye Bond/SmithGroup, consisting of The Freelon Group, Adjaye Associates, Davis Brody Bond and SmithGroup.

The challenge facing lead designer David Adjaye was daunting. Dreamed up by Washington’s original planner, Pierre L’Enfant, and enshrined under the 1901 McMillan Plan, the Mall is a hallowed landscape for Americans, replete with iconic structures, including the US Capitol and the Lincoln Memorial. ‘How do you add to one of the most important master plans in the world?’ asks Adjaye.

He proposed a stately ziggurat clad in a decorative facade, its tiered floors inspired by the crowns that top columns in the Yoruban architecture of West Africa. The museum’s architects call this form the ‘corona’, and they angled these tiers at precisely 17 degrees to match the Washington Monument pinnacle.

Last summer, workers installed the 3,600 panels of the corona. Made of aluminium coated in a bronze-coloured finish, they pay homage to the decorative ironwork made by enslaved artisans in 19th-century New Orleans and Charleston. The filigree patterns are ‘a computer-generated, modern interpretation’, says Philip Freelon, the museum’s architect of record. The design team chose a range of opacities varying from 65 to 90 per cent. ‘The skin [is] not monolithic in the way it’s perforated,’ Freelon says. ‘It varies, which gives the building its complexity.’ From the outside, the appearance of the wrapper changes depending on the weather and time of day.

The skin will also help to control heat gain on the south, the direction from which most visitors will arrive. This side of the 400,000 sq ft museum features a deep canopy inspired by vernacular African-American architecture. In front of the porch, a reflecting pool will relieve the heat of DC’s muggy summers.

Once inside, visitors will proceed to the galleries above and below – a full 60 per cent of the interior space lies underground. There will be sections devoted to history, culture and community (including sports and military history). From the outset, the designers had to strike a careful balance. They wanted to represent the injustice of slavery and discrimination, but also to celebrate black achievement.

When it opens this autumn, NMAAHC will convey both ‘uplift and recognition of despair’, according to Lonnie Bunch, director of the museum. On the concourse level, visitors can look up and see five storeys rising into the sky. ‘That notion of resiliency, of belief in a better day, is captured in that,’ Bunch says. Other spaces will be more difficult to experience. A darkened triangular room will display artifacts from a slave ship and project the stories of people involved in the slave trade. To allow for quiet reflection, the architects put an oculus-like fountain with seating at the north end.

Bunch also says one of his priorities for the new building was that it be of the Mall and not just on it. Often, ‘you walk into buildings on the Mall and you’re in the building – you forget you’re on the Mall’, he says. The team strove to establish a strong connection to the landscape. Through carefully chosen openings, visitors can look out at the graves of black war heroes in nearby Arlington Cemetery, or, discomfitingly, at the former site of a slave pen on the Mall’s grounds.

For Adjaye, the moments of both pride and unease reinforce a larger point, that ‘the migration of a group of people changed a nation’. The museum ‘stands with and against the other institutions on the Mall’, he says, echoing Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes, ‘with exactly this purpose: to say that this, too, is American history; this, too, is America.’

As originally featured in the February 2016 issue of Wallpaper* (W*203)

See the Design Awards 2016 in full – including our extra-special Judges' Awards - here

INFORMATION

For more information, visit the NMAAHC’s website

Photography: Stefan Ruiz

Architects have long turned their hand to product design – from David Adjaye to David Chipperfield and Zaha Hadid – these A-listers have all occasionally thought small in scale and occasionally wiggly. (Yes, Frank Gehry, we’re looking at you!)

To mark our 200th issue, we decided to double our Power 100 into a meaty, two-ton Power 200; an upscaled calibration of design achievement. Or rather 100+100 (normal disservice will be resumed next year) – including the top 20 architects to turn their pencils to product design.

Rising in the ranks are the likes of master multi-tasker Antonio Citterio, great British minimalist John Pawson and the monochromatically stylish Richard Meier. Daniel Libeskind, Isay Weinfeld, Shigeru Ban and Toyo Ito feature prominently as well, pushing the boundaries of product and material ever further. There are also illuminaries like Nigel Coates, Jean Nouvel, Mario Bellini, Renzo Piano and Rem Koolhaas/OMA who have and pretty much done it all. While collaboration isn’t a requirement, many have turned their talents to similar brands, including legendary Italian brand Alessi which counts Peter Zumthor, SANAA, Norman Foster, Massimiliano and Doriana Fuksas among their stylish ranks. 

Let the debate begin...

See the Power 200 in full here

INFORMATION
See the Power 200 in full

Launching at the Art Institute of Chicago, Making Place: The Architecture of David Adjaye is a celebration of the architect’s continuous evolution, rich body of work and growing roster of ongoing projects.

'This isn’t about sealing David’s career with a retrospective exhibition,' explains exhibition curator Zoë Ryan, 'but rather highlighting a critical moment to consider the possibilities of where David’s practice is headed. My hope is that the exhibition will promote a much richer understanding of an architect committed to creating projects of social and cultural significance and meaning.'

The Tanzania-born architect has worked internationally on a series of projects of all scales and typologies – current work includes for example the highly anticipated, complex commission for the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) in Washington, DC. His dynamic approach bridges cultures and geographical locations, responding to local concerns and context, rather than focusing on a specific signature style.

Drawings, sketches, mock-ups and scale models make up a rich and informative display that takes over the institute’s Abbot, and Architecture and Design galleries. A specially commissioned film on site adds further context to the practice’s work.

This is Adjaye’s very first comprehensive retrospective in a North American venue – held in the architecturally rich city of Chicago no less, as the same time as the region’s inaugural Chicago Architectural Biennale. A series of events will be held at the institute throughout the show’s duration, adding another layer to the discourse around its key themes. 

INFORMATION
Making Place: The Architecture of David Adjaye runs until 3 January 2016

ADDRESS

The Art Institute of Chicago
111 S Michigan Ave,
Chicago, IL 60603

VIEW GOOGLE MAPS

Renowned British architect David Adjaye has revealed plans for his firm's latest project: a paediatric cancer centre in Rwanda. 

Set across 40,000 sq m of Gahanga sector, in the Kicukiro district of Kigali, the Eugène Gasana Jr Foundation-commissioned hospital will provide medical services and lodging facilities for outpatients, as well as residential housing for physicians and nurses. 

The design draws on the traditional architectural vernacular of the region, inspired by the practice of imigongo, a popular art form in Rwanda that uses black, white and red patterns, often portrayed on walls, pottery and canvas within the region. 

Most importantly, the 100-bed hospital called for a space that would 'add dignity and hope to the lives of the children', a brief met through the inclusion of sweeping views, natural light and verdant plants throughout. David Adjaye commented, 'The design parameters [of this project] acknowledge the important role of environment on patient care and the process of healing is understood to be intrinsically linked to qualities such as light, views and materiality.'

A geometric language plays with the traditional compositions of imigongo, making the build a thoroughly modern proposition. Three densely planted external courtyards – cleverly surrounded by accommodation for uninterrupted views of the exterior – bring daylight deep into the three-storey structure.   

To shade it from the African sun, metallic triangular screens are knitted together, increasing and decreasing in density depending on their orientation, making the interior light 'gently tempered'. As they age, the metallic screens will weather and blend with the planting, giving the building an organic, living feel. 

Made using sustainable resources, the firm has yet to announce a completion date, but the project is already considered 'a first for the continent, at the heart of the continent.'

There are 650 million registered mobile phones in Africa. That’s more than in Europe or the US. Though its hard to know how many, a good percentage of these phones will have access to the Internet. And it is this idea of a super-connected continent that is at the centre of the Vitra Design Museum’s new exhibition ‘Making Africa: A Continent of Contemporary Design’.

The museum spent two years visiting and talking to 70 designers, artists, researchers, architects, gallerists and curators in Africa’s creative and entrepreneurial polestars - cities such as Lagos, Dakar, Cape Town, Cairo and Nairobi.  And ‘Making Africa’ identifies a new generation of African designers, artists, architects and cultural entrepreneurs - 120 of them feature in the exhibition - who see little value in European-model distinctions between design and fine art or between creative disciplines. As 'digital natives' (an unfortunate choice of words perhaps), they offer a global audience an alternative to Africa’s bad news narrative. By redefining design's relationship to modernism, they are making Africa a new hub of design innovation and experimentation, particularly in their use materials.

The exhibition takes in the eyewear sculptures of Kenyan artist Cyrus Kabiru, the furniture of Malian designer Cheick Diallo, the photography of Mozambican Mário Macilau and the Nigerian J.D. ‘Okhai Ojeikere. Also featuring is the architecture of Francis Kéré, Kunlé Adeyemi and the African-born, British-based David Adjaye.

‘Making Africa’ draws parallels to the work of photographers such as Seydoy Keïta and Malick Sidibé and the South Africa-based Drum magazine during the 1960s, as well as the first wave of postcolonial architecture.

After its stretch at the Vitra Design Museum, the exhibition will move on to the Guggenheim in Bilbao this autumn. It is accompanied by a 352-page book, the first comprehensive overview, so Vitra insists, of African contemporary design.

ADDRESS

Vitra Design Museum, Charles-Eames-Str. 2, D-79576 Weil am Rhein

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David Adjaye is more at home than most architects in a gallery setting. He thinks like a conceptual artist, creating spatial experiences with light, form and exotic materials that have the power to make us think. Fusions of art, artefact and space, his built work is more tangible than most, interesting to the touch. He takes a similar multifaceted approach to his small-scale constructions, photography and furniture as well.

'Form, Heft, Material', on through May at the Haus der Kunst in Munich, is therefore a great journey for a follower of contemporary culture. If you've never had the fortune to experience one of Adjaye's spaces up close, this is the next best thing. Rather: this is your chance. Curator Okwui Enwezor - along with Zoë Ryan, the John H Bryan chair and curator of architecture and design at the Art Institute of Chicago - have brought in the entire wood-slat 'Horizon' pavilion, designed by Adjaye for Albion Barn in Oxford, and the monolithic furniture he created to complement it.

'Horizon' is one of more than 45 projects in this largest-ever survey of the African-born, London-based architect, which includes drawings, models, sketches, films, and large-scale fragments of projects. His unique approach that defies convention gives his projects hybridised qualities: part monumental, part delicate, they are emotional and alive with meaning. Many of these projects feature in bold photographs by Ed Reeve, a friend for whom Adjaye also designed one of his first rule-breaking homes in London. 

One of our most international architects, with offices on four continents and a particular affinity for African urbanism, Adjaye is difficult to pin down because of his esoteric style and his reimagining of location-based motifs. What unifies his buildings are their dissolution of barriers and their ability to develop and engage communities. A room in the exhibition is dedicated to his extensive fieldwork in Africa, resulting in two books, an office in Ghana and projects like Ghana's Cape Coast Slavery Museum and even the forthcoming Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) in Washington, DC. Compared with his private residential commissions in London and New York, for instance, those latter projects are amazingly permeable.

Less a retrospective than an exploration of future potential, 'Form, Heft, Material' opens a discussion around what buildings can strive for in the 21st century. There are few better architects to illustrate how socially effective architecture can be.

ADDRESS

Haus der Kunst
Prinzregentenstrasse 1
80538 München
Germany

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The opening of designer Roksanda Ilincic's first store, on London's Mount Street, also marks the label's new snappier 'Roksanda' rebranding. With an architecture and applied arts degree behind her, the Belgrade native's debut retail proposition joins a flock of new fashion flagships that are putting high-design building materials on show as keenly as their wares. Ilincic worked in partnership with good friend, British architect David Adjaye on the project, and the result is a textural marvel, from the store's monochromatic, terrazzo floor to the brass racks that zigzag down the centre of the Grade II listed building. Tiers of pebbly cement define the interior walls, with floating accessory shelves jutting out at random intervals, as angled mirrors bounce natural light from the space's freshly planted back courtyard.

If the townhouse has a slightly Brutalist vibe upstairs, then downstairs defines the brand's feminine underbelly. Comprising a VIP entertaining salon, spacious fitting rooms and an all-blue guest bathroom, the lower floor is where Ilincic has played with floor-to-ceiling colour. Blush pink melts into Bordeaux and then aubergine, as plush carpeting meets felted walls (one of the designer's preferred fabrications). Given Ilincic's reputation for contrasting bold and muted tones to great graphic success, colour has similarly been used as a clever spatial separator - a splash of chartreuse curving out the store's downstairs children's corner that houses her Blossom line.

ADDRESS

Roksanda
9 Mount Street
London
W1K 3NG

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David Adjaye is well-known for his recent string of public works, like the Stephen Lawrence Centre, Rivington Street and the Whitechapel and Chrisp Market Idea Stores, but he undoubtedly first attracted the spotlight through his early residential commissions, having since designed houses for artists and actors like Tim Noble and Sue Webster, Chris Ofili and Ewan McGregor.

One of his latest residential projects, the Sunken House – also known affectionately as Ed’s Shed – was a commission by photographer Ed Reeve, completed in 2007.

See more images of the Sunken House, or Ed's Shed, in Hackney

The beautifully minimal house, a simple cube located in the conservation area of De Beauvoir town in London’s Hackney, certainly stands out among the area’s more traditional builds.

The solid timber structure was partly prefabricated and features three floors; an excavated concrete lower ground floor, where the house sits, including a sunken patio, kitchen and dining area, the ground floor bedrooms and a top level bright living area. The wood prefab element, not only kept the construction costs lower than usual, but it also limited the on-site construction programme to an amazing approximate one week.

The timber rainscreen, cladding the house from all sides, gives the impression of a continuous skin, enveloping harmoniously the structure in soft dark-stained cedar. Lit mainly through long horizontal and vertical openings on the upper floors and the courtyard opening on lower ground, the house is as clean and minimal inside, as it looks from the outside; a mysterious perfect wooden box, peeping through the traditional low brick wall garden fence.