David Adjaye is the most famous black architect in the world. In fact, he may be the only famous black architect in the world. The tall, slim, ebony-handsome Londoner shrugs off his celebrity status and prefers to talk about his work. But big wins create big stars.
Adjaye teamed up with New York firm Davis Brody Bond Aedas to beat out a slew of big names, including fellow Brit Norman Foster, for the commission to build the $500 million National Museum of African American History and Culture, which will rise on the National Mall next to the Washington Monument between now and 2015. His team stood out, not just for its heavily African-influenced design for the new museum, Adjaye believes, but because he pitched the museum as a celebration of black achievement rather than as a lamentation on slavery.
Adjaye has had a meteoric rise in a business that is often called “an old man’s profession.” Conquering the complex bouillon of art history, design, structural engineering and human behavior — and, most, important, the connections and schmoozing that it takes to put up a building — can take a lifetime. Frank Gehry and Foster are 82; Moshe Safdie is 77. Yet at age 45, Adjaye has already earned a designation that puts him in a category that he dislikes: “starchitect.”
Adjaye is quintessentially what the late documentary filmmaker St. Clair Bourne used to call “an international Negro.” The son of Ghanaian diplomats, he was born in Tanzania in 1966 and lived in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia; Beirut, Lebanon; and Cairo, Egypt, with his family before settling in London. He has offices in Berlin and above a 1927 bank building on the ragged edge of New York City’s hip TriBeCa neighborhood. Now he’s back to leaving a trail of achievement in cities across several continents: Moscow; Denver; New York; Oslo, Norway; Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates; and, of course, Washington, D.C.