On a plot of land with a complicated and violent history, the architect David Adjaye is realizing a dream project. At the end of this month, he will open the National Museum of African American History and Culture — the 12th and final Smithsonian museum on the National Mall — on five acres that were once home to a slave market, just beyond the White House. “I got a chance to work on a playing field that’s at once political, social, and deeply charged,” he said. “It’s a moment where architecture becomes very visible in the consciousness of a collective of people. You’re not just solving problems, you’re also creating ideas about the future.” Congress established plans 
for the museum 13 years ago, but it is only now opening in its 420,000-square-foot building, which stands adjacent to the Washington Monument. A bold, three-tiered Yoruba-style crown made of an elaborate bronze trellis, it is a nod to both classic West African architecture and African-American craftsmanship from the antebellum South. To understand Adjaye’s buildings, one must realize the 
depth of his knowledge of Africa—a continent made up of 
many languages, cultures, and nuances — and a multiplicity of architectural styles far more complex than the monolithic variety the art world often equates with it. Adjaye was born in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, the first of three sons. His father worked in the Foreign Service, and by the time Adjaye was nine years old, his family had moved between Ghana, Egypt, 
Kenya, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Uganda before finally settling in North London. The peripatetic urge stayed with him: In 2010 he completed a decadelong pilgrimage, traveling to every country on the African continent to observe and document its architecture. This project resulted in a set of books, published by Rizzoli, on metropolitan African architecture. Adjaye’s
migratory lifestyle continues to inform his practice today. “The uncovering and replaying of history through different lenses 
is a very important part of making public buildings,” he says. The interior of the African American museum 
is divided into three distinct parts: the Middle Passage, the Great Migration, and the contemporary experience. “It became 
a site with which we wanted to create a sacred relationship,” says Adjaye, noting that the galleries holding historical 
artifacts and documents will lie below ground level in order 
“to charge that landscape — not to try to re-create the memory of any slave plinth, but as a device that would open an aperture 
to that landscape.” Once visitors enter the building’s rotunda, they descend 80 feet by escalator before taking an elevator to the museum’s history galleries. Adjaye wanted to “turn that landscape into a metaphysical composition where even though you think you’re on solid ground, there’s actually a cavern of layers of history underneath it.” Personal experience, as well as historical memory, informs Adjaye’s architectural decisions. Throughout the museum, he strives for what he calls an “ease of navigation” — an idea 
he thinks about a lot. His youngest brother was diagnosed 
at five years old with a rare medical condition that rendered him immobile. “Having had a childhood where your own 
brother is completely disabled by a condition, and then having to negotiate a constructed world that created every possible obstacle against his mobility,” he says, “it’s something that as an able-bodied person you don’t encounter, so you don’t even notice. As a young person, it became clear to me that these were fundamental issues and the world we constructed was a world for a certain type of person.” Today, nearly every one of Adjaye’s buildings is designed without outside stairs, including the National Museum of African American History and Culture. Adjaye is often described as an architect with 
a meticulous approach but no signature style. Artists and museum directors in particular speak of their appreciation for his deep commitment to research, and during the past decade Adjaye has become the architect to the art stars. In that time he has secured a dozen high-profile commissions, including the design of the 2015 Venice Biennale and buildings for the Aïshti Foundation, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Latvian Museum of Contemporary Art. One of Adjaye’s earliest art world projects was designing the private home and studio in London’s Whitechapel district for painter Chris Ofili, a former classmate at the Royal College and now his best friend. He went on to conceive both of Ofili’s homes in Trinidad and collaborate on exhibition design. He constructed the narrow sanctuary that contained Ofili’s 13 rhesus monkey paintings for the iconic The Upper Room, shown first at Victoria Miro Gallery in 2002 and permanently reinstalled at Tate Britain. A year later, Adjaye totally transformed the Neoclassical edifice of the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale into Ofili’s Within Reach presentation. Adjaye has also designed studios for artists Jake Chapman, Tim Noble, and Sue Webster, as well as Lorna Simpson and James Casebere, who share a four-story Brooklyn building dubbed “Pitch Black” for its façade made of black polypropylene panels. The back is covered in glass. These projects later evolved into exhibition collaborations. In 2005 he designed the pavilion that housed Your Black Horizon, a work Olafur Eliasson created for that year’s Venice Biennale. The installation, a minimal horizon line around a dark room, documented and projected a full day’s light and color cycle from the sky, looping every 15 minutes. It is now permanently housed on the Croatian island of Lopud. In 2012 Adjaye designed a temporary cylindrical structure 
in which to view Doug Aitken’s film series “The Source,” a project that debuted at Tate Liverpool as part of the Liverpool Biennial and later traveled to the United States for Sundance. 
“I enjoyed the immediacy of the dialogue with him,” Aitken 
said. “The sensitivity to materials and the geometry of the space was really amazing on David’s behalf. He really created something that became this subconscious beacon.” Adjaye even appeared in one of the films, which looked at creativity via 23 conversations with artists, including Theaster Gates, Liz Glynn, Jacques Herzog, Tilda Swinton, and James Turrell. “It was about creating this environment of intimacy and one-to-one dialogue, but at the same time, you can step back,” Aitken said. “When you’re there, you can see maybe six different conversations happening at once and hear this cacophony. It’s like you’re at a dinner party.” The architect worked with Wangechi Mutu to turn Salon 94’s uptown town house into a ghastly, romantic, opulent banquet 
for “Exhuming Gluttony: A Lover’s Requiem.” And in 2013 he enacted a complete last-minute change of plan for painter Julie Mehretu’s “Liminal Squared” show at White Cube Bermondsey. Her studio wanted to reconfigure the way visitors navigated the space, so Adjaye decided to change the axis of 
the room entirely. “The last exhibitions I’ve had have had architectural interventions into the gallery or exhibition space to effect or shift the 
work, to move through the space, to change how you perceive the paintings,” Mehretu said. She recognized a similar reliance on intuition in Adjaye’s work and her own. “I asked him how he came up with it, and he said, ‘Well, it just sort of came to me.’ I love that.” Adjaye’s connections to artists have led to newly appointed advisory roles for ambitious projects, including Space Caribbean, a noncollecting institution in Kingston, Jamaica, dedicated to contemporary art, and Art Basel Cities, the art fair’s new initiative to develop cultural events and programming in various cities. “I’m obsessed with cities. I was approached to think of 
the idea of art and public life globally, rather than just as an art fair,” Adjaye says. “It’s a bit of a Trojan horse in a weird way, 
but it’s a very exciting one, where cities or towns can solicit Art Basel to do an inventory and workshop to manifest what is going on within their communities and create opportunities.” Adjaye is an artist’s architect, an endorsement that has helped establish him as a museum’s go-to architect as well. The first museum his firm designed was the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, completed in 2007. Like the new Smithsonian building, it is made of three tiers and optimizes flexibility in the space’s use. The 27,000-square-foot building was the first leed-certified art museum in the country and the firm’s first U.S. project, garnering a contract of $11.3 million. The contract for the National Museum of African American History and Culture is valued at $309 million. It’s a starchitect’s
budget, but Adjaye idles low — a classic combination of humility and confidence, moxie and conviction. It’s an attitude felt deeply in how he reminisces about past projects and waxes poetic on future ones. “My projects are very much like journeys,” he says. “It’s really about how spatial markers and devices are always giving clues as to how to use the building without needing a manual.” Of the African American museum, he says, “We made a big deal of making a very articulated journey to the building. You really understand this notion of rising and falling; you’re not looking for things,” he says. So, was he successful? “Well, you can tell me when you visit,” he says, laughing. “I think it’s great, but I could be completely off.”  Read more