David Adjaye

Ghanaian-British architect

Born in 22 September 1966 at Tanzania. His

dad is a Ghanaian diplomat. He moved to
London at the age of 9, before that he lived
in Egypt, Yemen and Lebanon.

He completed BA in Architecture from

London South Bank University in 1990. He
graduated with an MA in 1993 from the
Royal College of Art.

As soon as he completed his degree won the RIBA Bronze Medal Award, a prize offered
for RIBA Part 1 projects, normally won by students who have only completed a
bachelor's degree.
Nobel Peace Center in Oslo, Norway, The Bernie Grant Arts Centre,
2005 North London, 2007

The Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA

Idea Store in Whitechapel, UK, 2005 Denver), in Denver, Colorado, 2007
 The Moscow School of Management
SKOLKOVO, Moscow, Russia,2010

The National Museum of African American

History and Culture, Washington D.C. USA, 2016
As he traveled a lot from Egypt, Yemen, Lebanon, Tanzania to London, he seems to
have a different approach to design, he acquired an understanding and
susceptibility towards the cultures he came across, which he later on emerged as
studying different architectural styles in his creation.

David Adjaye is a socially responsible Architect. He uses the factor of richness in

history, culture and architectural wisdom that he grabed from his life. According to
him architecture is a powerful tool for social, material and conceptual
transformation. He is said to have a Democratic approach to desiging
 The National Museum of African American
History and Culture

The Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture

(NMAAHC) is situated on the last five acres of the National Mall in Washington, D.C.,
once the epicenter of the nation’s slave trade, on a prominent site just across from the
Washington Monument.
 Play of light

The jaalis are working in

such a way that
required amount of
light is accessible.
Plans of different floors
Situated on the Washington Monument grounds the
museum maintains a subtle profile in the landscape – more
than half is below ground – with five storeys above. The
corona is based on elements of the Washington Monument,
closely matching the 17-degree angle of the capstone and
the panel size and pattern has been developed using the
Monument stones as a reference. The entire building is
wrapped in an ornamental bronze lattice that is a historical
reference to African American craftsmanship. The density of
the pattern can be modulated to control the amount of
sunlight and transparency into the interior. The south entry
is composed of the Porch and a central water feature. An
extension of the building out into the landscape, the porch
creates an outdoor room that bridges the gap between the
interior and exterior.
At 50m (49’-2”) deep, the setback is similar to
other buildings on the north side of the Mall.
The underside of the porch roof is tilted
upward allowing reflection of the moving
water below. This covered area creates a
microclimate where breezes combine with the
cooling waters to generate a place of refuge
from the hot summer sun. There is also an
outdoor patio on the porch rooftop that is
accessed from a mezzanine level within the
building.
The cultural resemblance features an intricately detailed, bronze-colored façade
that is steeped in references to the struggles and achievements of African
Americans

Each tier of the façade consists of

approximately 1,200 ornate cast
aluminum panels.

They are very strategically placed

which reflects the social
background of people that can
relate to the way they gone
through these last centuries in
America.

The fight for black lives have been

trending since last few years but
its roots have been incoperated
with long struggles and sacrifices.
 Adjaye Associates’ NMAAHC couldn’t
be just a building that was a
background to its content
16 FEBRUARY 2017
BY MICHAEL WEBB BUILDINGS
The filigree facade of David Adjaye’s
museum references the artful
metalsmithing of freed slaves
For the past century, Washington DC
has been a graveyard for architectural
innovation, a place where conformity
rules. IM Pei’s East Building for the
National Gallery of Art and Maya Lin’s
fiercely contested Vietnam Veterans’
Memorial are among the few
exceptions to a dismal saga of
compromise and mediocrity
In Washington, as in Rome, a city of brick was
transformed into a city of marble when the republic
acquired imperial ambitions, and the official buildings
are as white as the power structure was until quite
recently. Though the capital was built astride the
Mason-Dixon line, it was long segregated, and
President Kennedy dubbed it ‘a city of Southern
efficiency and Northern charm’. The noblest feature is
the Baroque plan, a diagram of radiating boulevards
and grand axes that Pierre l’Enfant borrowed from
Versailles and superimposed on a swamp. Lacking a
Sun King to respond to his vision, the authorities have
minutely regulated development and almost every
project (including the National World War II
Memorial, which could be mistaken for a posthumous
design by Albert Speer) has been nibbled to death.
Douglas Cardinal, a Canadian architect who was
selected for the Smithsonian’s National Museum of
the American Indian, was fired after construction
began and his design was imperfectly realised by
another firm.
Review: D.C.'s new African
American museum is a bold
challenge to traditional Washington
architecture
BY CHRISTOPHER HAWTHORNE,
ARCHITECTURE CRITIC
In full shadow it's a workmanlike brown, the color of shoe
leather. In direct sunlight the shade is closer to bronze. Late
in the day its western edge, turned toward the Washington
Monument and the Lincoln Memorial, begins to reflect the
setting sun and turns a surprisingly bright gold.
The shifting personality of the National Museum of African
American History and Culture, designed by a consortium of
architecture firms calling itself Freelon Adjaye
Bond/SmithGroup and set to open Sept. 24 near the center
of the Mall, is no fluke or simple trick of light.
The most impressive and ambitious public building to go up
in Washington in a generation — if also the owner of a truly
awkward acronym — the NMAAHC draws its considerable
power from a willingness to embrace the nearly bottomless
complexity of both its mission and its site.
As a new branch of the Smithsonian located three
blocks south of the White House, charged with
marking the origins and history of the slave trade
and giving some measure of the modern African
American experience, the museum could hardly
be more fraught as a cultural institution or work
of architecture.
Despite some flaws and unfortunate signs of cost-
cutting, the design succeeds almost precisely to
the degree that it is enigmatic and even fickle,
spanning huge gulfs in the national character
without being naive enough to try to close them.
The building embraces memory and aspiration,
protest and reconciliation, pride and shame.
Its attitude toward architectural battle lines is
similarly catholic. It is an essentially modern
building cloaked in a decorative pattern, aloof and
standoffish in certain ways and carefully
contextual in others.
As it rises from the northern edge of the Mall
along Constitution Avenue — with the
Washington Monument directly to the west, the
Smithsonian’s 1964 National Museum of
American History to the east, the massive 1932
Commerce Department to the north and open
grass to the south — the NMAAHC is undeniably
an imposing architectural object, monumental
and temple-like.
Review: The Smithsonian African
American Museum Is Here at Last.
And It Uplifts and Upsets.
By Holland Cotter
WASHINGTON — On a late summer day in 1963, 200,000
Americans made the Washington Monument the
compass needle for a new direction in history, up and
forward, when they gathered at its base, then marched a
mile or so on to hear the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
preach — sing, really — a sermon on racism and a dream
of change.
On an early autumn day this Saturday, just yards from the
monument, the compass itself will, symbolically
speaking, become fully visible, when the National
Museum of African American History and Culture opens
to the public. To paraphrase the preacher: It’s here at
last, here at last. And it’s more than just impressive. It’s a
data-packed, engrossing, mood-swinging must-see.
Rising in three low, inverted-pyramid tiers, the
building occupies what had been the last
undeveloped museum site on the National
Mall. Its design, by the Tanzanian-born British
architect David Adjaye, is unlike any of the
others. They are of white or buff stone or
concrete; this one, covered in metal panels, is a
deep black-brown. The other museums reflect
light; this one absorbs it, making it look, despite
its size, discreet and recessive, about silhouette
rather than bulk.
That may not have been the intended effect.
The initial plan was to cast the facade panels,
perforated with decorated patterns, in bronze.
When that proved too costly, painted aluminum
was substituted, with a loss of reflective sheen.
In midday sunlight, the building looks rusted
and a little shaggy, like a giant magnet bristling
with metal filings.