David Adjaye on evolving typologies in architecture

thank you it's a real pleasure to be back in Cape Town this has been an amazing conference and I'm really honored to be part of this group and showing you the work I Jaso shi'ites which is the company I formed really in 20 in 2000 the beginning of the millennia is a firm which is sort of dedicated to four strands really research and sort of extensive research which culminates in publications and we've just done the first one and I'll show you that very quickly experiments in product furniture sort of environments emotive environments and then some sort of the evolution of the evolution of residential topologies in the world and I'll show you examples of that and public buildings in its widest form and that sort of discourse now as we said the central concern and interest is the way in which architecture now has to respond to the changing world the way in which we have to kind of think about the kind of responsibility that we have to the public realm and how the act of making which is laborious still slow still tedious takes four years a year to design matters and shapes the lives of the people that inhabited citizens the cetera so how do we talk about these things firstly practice I am of guiding and parents my father was of that generation of you know and crew ma diplomats and promotes the first sort of president of a you know a first free country in Africa from the colonial period and you know it's kind of brought up with that discipline of you know being a professional in the world and being proud to be a professional in the world and not just to be a professional a professional of just African heritage but a professional person in the world who is interested in the planet and interested in in the affairs of the world not to limit yourself so in a way I've sort of found myself making a practice which is Polyphemus and is about creating satellites in places where we were we started here and from here started here we moved here we're now in America and we're here in Accra we just opened this summer and for me it's about making agency in places where the work occurs it's not about speculating and finding work it's not a commercial endeavor it's about the kind of the speculating and the mining of opportunity that can happen in different places and if that is relevant we will be there and we will sort of make places in that environment the first piece of research which happened after 11 years of work was to first started off as a little sort of autobiography for me it was about really taking a step back after leaving Africa when I was 14 been brought up in Europe I wanted to come back on my own terms not to my family so I spent eleven years going to every single country and documenting the architecture of the continents when I recorded every single city in terms of its high and low architecture in terms of its bucolic aspect it's and it's kind of the qualities that kind of people understand and really to try and get a sense in myself of what the continent means now the political map the political map of Africa is the one that we all have got ingrained and programmed in our minds but for me in the 21st century ice I suggest that this is really the map of Africa this is the new Geographic map which shows the six terrains and the shifting terrains that are in Africa the forest which was much greater before is now the blue the savanna is the light green the purple of the mountains the orange is the edge of the desert the thing that is holding the desert from you know creeping right down to West Africa and the Maghreb which is the Mediterranean cusp and I think through this map for me we've started to kind of formulate a way of practice which is not only affecting the way I work in the continent because I'm now working here but also the way I work in the world which is that geography culture and place are so in a strictly linked and even I'm also now in the world that we live in and that actually to understand maybe a relationship in Africa maybe we have to move beyond saying this is South African architecture or Ghanaian architecture but this is a kind of architecture of place of forest region an architecture of the mountain region an architecture of the Sahel and then what you start to find is that even though you may be francophone or your Anglophone there are incredible connections which are coming through geography and place which are binding you and you might not know it and that's been extraordinary during this 11-year journey to see those connections and that's that's a profound thing that's kind of affecting the way we're working all the time now so this this book just came out last year and we're really proud of it and I were doing other studies right now looking at different parts of the world and trying to understand the way in which the built environment has been made and how it kind of affects people um second section is really to talk about the evolving topologies in the world and disaster and places of delicate eco systems is something that's becoming more present in our world and it's something that I think architects have to kind of be absolutely engaged in senpai is a Ghanian word which means a good story really is about how to make a response to a disaster which I think was the probably the first big sort of an urban disaster that we've seen in sort of the sort of in our century which sort of woke us all up to how fragile are our cities are and that is New Orleans and Katrina I think Katrina was that media event which really kind of blew up in our minds that wow we are in a fragile ecology and I think architecture has to respond to that there's a fantastic charity called make it right which has ten architects to come in and work on creating new topologies for these communities that where the flood happened was of course the poorest part of the city because of course New Orleans has built a below sea level but the highest point is obviously the downtown which was not affected and the lowest part the residential areas where the floods occurred New Orleans is famous for its Mardi Gras and incredible festivals it's a kind of an incredible multicultural melting pot but the breach happened in the most devastating part this is the most delicate part between the sort of the sea and the sort of this Mississippi coming in and you can imagine these incredible ecosystems suddenly becoming the places of extraordinary trauma so in a sort of very quick second our cities and our organizations can be completely destroyed and devastated and I think if there's a lack if we allow mechanization to just build the environments that we're in and we feel that as architects and designers week you know we absorb that responsibility because it's in that sector we create potentials like this and I think that this shows for me an example why architecture or design is ravished when I say design is required ever more with mechanizations to kind of make more responsive scenarios to to climate um these are the shotgun houses of New Orleans these are some of the kind of more responsive houses commercial architectures that were there this was something we looked at we were asked to come in and really rebuild make a model of sort of cheap housing the cheapest house that you house builder could make was the budget we had to use but we had to flip that and to make it respond and to make it do more than just be the sum of an enclosure for a family so we said we questioned everything foundations roof the way in which you made panel ization we took we analyzed the typical house which was a slave house and it said why now let's invert and change everything about this to something new we said if this is what housing does if the roofs usually traditionally collect water our traditional perceptions you need a roof to collect a drain to then go into the storm water sort of runoff but actually stormwater runoff fail because we have too much urbanization and so they kind of go back so actually what we need to do is collect water so we can use it as gray water so we said all the roofs have to be inverted collect them make just take them off and flip them up and use them as cups that collect the rain and use it to also collect the sort of energy from the Sun but also in doing that you create a new topology you move you move the topology from a pyramid to an inverted pyramid so a collector of energy rather than one that's trying to kind of you know protect itself from well so this became a motif that we thought was powerful and could become something new we talked about all the floodplain issues making houses that would allow themselves to be above the 500 year flood as a basic minimum and and also to say that in New Orleans which at the ground plane is extremely hot but at the upper level and you see the kind of balconies of the rich houses is extremely cool because suddenly you get the currents why can't everybody have that sort of luxury so move away from an architecture of being on the ground and hot and move to an architecture of being in the air this is the rebuilding of our sites the 10 architects are all in here it's a bit dot but this is one of my houses they're about 20 of these houses built it's a it's a system which was given to the community for free we offer our services for free for this project and basically there are patterns almost like house building patterns if your house was destroyed in an asteroid you can go to the ward choose a pattern and work through their mortgage system to then get your house remade into one of these designs we've been this has been going for quite a few years and we've been developing the evolution of it and it's just amazing to see how people have been using these spaces this space not only works we talk to FEMA and what they started to kind of say was really powerful about this for them was that this allowed what some of the biggest problems about a flood is that actually not so much escaping the water but actually having somewhere to stay for maybe one to three weeks whilst the rescue team comes to find you if you're in the middle of nowhere and so the idea of having a space that could be absolutely inhabited and safe is also paramount not just a place that you could have but the family could go up there and and wait and the structure was robust enough this is just the latest one that was recently built that we're really proud of and so this sort of the evolution of the color the form the construction techniques are happening and this is a traditional house here and this is this is this new type and we had images recently of a wedding that was celebrated in here and we were really really excited by that this is about this is that daughter has just been completed this is just looking at the evolution of to one of the early ones of one of the latest what later ones some people I think think that we build houses just just sort of as commissions but we actually take on houses that for us question new modes of work and life new modes of construction etc and I'm going to take you through three houses first one we called the sunken house and it really was about making a low cost house in in the developed world but trying to explore something which was about zero carbon so how can we make use the best of mechanization these techniques are now becoming much more common but when we did this house in 2005 2006 it was completely new we said we would make a zero carbon house totally prefabricated in the factory made out of compressed timber and that we were clad it in a spruce which will then become the kind of primary material in the space we the site where this house was made is in the East End in the sort of conservation area of the East End so we were lucky to work with the borough to be able to put a contemporary piece of architecture in a sort of Victorian landscape I show you this because it's really critical that it was basically about making an excavation this is the street level putting in a concrete slab and dropping this in a fat from a factory in four days onto the site and then the cladding and the dressing took you know the rest of the time to do but the construction technique and you see this this is a graphic is really all the same it's this timber solid compressed section which is engineered in two different sizes the acoustics the kind of construction and the whole kind of weighing weight you which you make it takes away from that hollowness of dryline it was the idea trying to make something which had the integrity of its form built into the nature of the way it's fabricated but also then for me it has to then become something that's emotional becomes a place that can be human and and and kind of express the kind of humanity that we want in the sort of manufacturing this is the house you can imagine when it first came out there was a lot of controversial controversy in the neighborhood there were really some very upset people who thought we'd devalued their neighborhood and now this house has got a lot of attention and and and it's sort of pride of the community but it was a very unusual creature that arrived it has a kind of roof terrace there's a bed basically there's an this is an open bed for the summer which is this little secret for the for the couple to escape from their kids and from everybody else if they want and hide in the roof it's super simple there's one window in the facade and it frames a very important sort of church which is sort of this beautiful gothic gothic piece and it's all about the staircase which is made out of a veneered plywood walnut veneer plywood which runs in a sort of vertical freedom and paths sort of trip light space through the the chamber and then you realise that the living room is basically in the trees so we made one piece of glass that frames the trees and so you're aspects because the site is incredibly narrow all the other houses of gardens you don't you're in it's just in a plot but it takes advantage of what is that London rear view you know if you know London houses the most beaut thing about the Victorian terraces the gardens and the allotments in the Commons that are behind and usually the houses have beautiful fronts and really terrible rears and I think the the late part of the 20th century in London has been about young architects ripping down the rears of these Victorian buildings to put up glass facades to look at this beautiful thing which everybody forgot about and thought was kind of ugly so this is a house that says no actually its primary response is that and its second response is now the street which is the urban the urban landscape in the court this is a living room so very simple details by taking away manufactured windows but but just buying glass as we could we were able to keep the cost down so these are not sort of factory made windows but just gasket units and then we've sort of engineered the the system and the sealants to kind of put them in and then ventilation really happens with these panels doors or little portals all over the house glasses fixed ventilation is these moving solid panels which makes the cost cheap this is the sunken chamber which then allows you know to see you know a private space from the kitchen etc and go around the house and then to see the landscape just moments and junctions that can be enjoyed and then next the next project this is a house in New York that we completed a couple of years ago which is at the extreme end we work and all for us we work on at low and high and this is a house in probably one of the most sort of bougie parts of New York it's in park just off Park Avenue this is this is Park Avenue here this is 77th Street so it's it's on the east side of New York this is my site here which is probably the remnant of what happens if you know about New York has zoning basically you have as of right and this is what New York eventually became this was the zoning that allows you to build this much but these properties probably sold their rights to adjacent property so in the end were not allowed to be developed so there are these two carriage houses left my client bought one of those and that's where the project sort of happens the project this project where you have suddenly a client who wants a house essentially the house is developed for it has an extension about collect art collection in it but it's what we tried to do is to say how can we make a house in an urban context like New York with its incredible history and layering so we said why don't we take the clues of the planning and zoning of New York as a way to drive the the relationship in the in the kind of form so this is the existing facade of the building we clipped a little form a really extreme form next to it we made a light well and then we made another form the second tower which contains the living room and the main principal space that you come in it's basically a gallery you walk straight into a gallery for hanging art and then we made a third form which is this vertical shaft which steps up as you go up and then a fourth chamber here which reveals all the foundations because we dug down three stories below and we went up five stories so it's a kind of vertical shaft that cuts through New York and allows you to see the way in which the city is made and you realize that actually the terra firma of New York is not really the terra firma it's actually a couple of layers below and that people think they're walking on the ground but actually they're not it's a completely it's an artifice and actually the ground plane is actually somewhere two storeys three storeys below when you cut through that you see what New York was made up of it was schist stone which is this extraordinary granite which made the city timber compression forms and and the foundations are all there they're still under the city the city is a piece of archaeology and the architecture in a way presents a kind of way of looking at the city vertically and horizontally as a kind of new type in the city so here it is it's made out of black cast concrete this is its initial form it slips out and then sort of presents a new sort of entrance this is the gallery that you come into you can drive a truck straight into the front it's probably the only Park Avenue house that you can drive a truck straight into only because the things that you walk in they're very wealthy and you want to make sure that you're not schlepping them on the street so so we developed a bridge with an incredible museum scale door to get you in there the residents come straight up and you see the first light wheel which articulates the two towers this is this third like well where you suddenly see this is the original foundations of the city and we framed that the beams collapsed around it to brace it and so you see it in you reveal it and the concrete we spent we spent an exorbitant amount of money teaching New York contractors to do bad concrete I was like let's make dry handmade concrete I want to see the life in it and I wanted concrete to behave like geology I wanted it to look like what it is it's you know it's material out of the ground not a sort of artificial artifice so my interest in concrete is the way in which it it performs we're displaying weight materiality texture imperfection and the whole house is some poured so you have these extraordinary creases on line it looks like the skin of an elephant living space so you're looking through three layers you're looking to the outside the fin chamber the first light well the second one and the one that I showed you before is behind you this is that thin chamber which is a library and sort of looks through and then this is looking the entire way through like well one like well two like well three in the outside and then this is that central one which talks about the urbanism so you see the architecture kind of and the sort of light wells and the sort of back towers and then in the evening this Specter public producers becomes the largest part of the office and the biggest area that we're working on and it works through commercial project well very few commercial for its new sort of if it's commercial it's usually institutions that we're working with but it's really culture and education predominantly this is called Frances Gregory um very important for tough series that I've been working on is the notion of libraries and this idea of dealing with what this sort of a relevant conversation that libraries are no longer necessary that they're out of dates that everybody's going to be on Macs or whatever else and you know it started with the idea of store in Whitechapel which is a project I won many years ago but this is a kind of evolution of it where what we've been testing is understanding that the library yes may not be the kind of you know this sort of depository of information only in the world anymore but what has happened is that the topology has evolved to become a public room for citizens and actually to just wipe it out because the technology is evolving is maybe you know missing something very fundamental which is emotionally been ingrained in our society which is that you know there these places that we like to have where you can go and access things and be with people of different generations in different ages and that's actually emotionally really important and it's something that's profound and also that in the world that we live in we are more and more interested in adult education we are lifelong learners we no longer just finish our education at school we keep going and these environments are about that they're about making opportunities to learn motor mechanics yoga acupuncture you know ought to read you know the classics Shakespeare whatever you prefer or to do your homework if that's what you're interested in so these environments become these nodes that are important and for me they're very important in neighborhoods which have the least kind of amount of public infrastructure that they're they're very powerful and that they're very emotive spaces that can I can edify so we always take we always do the competitions for these libraries usually in very low-income communities and this is what I'm really proud of it's a very low cost project but it doesn't look it but I trust me it's extremely low cost and it's in Washington and it's at the end of a unique phenomenon in Washington which is that you have these incredible belts of thick forests that are absolutely surrounded by these suburbs these plant suburbs which are so beautiful so this is sort of some of that early turn-of-the-century housing the project acts as a pavilion it's a gateway so between that housing and the park it's in Section it looks kind of straightforward I guess it's basically a built it's a series of buildings within buildings which change keep changing scale and and and work through a series of things which I'll just explain the outer skin is a box which is only 40% glazed but it looks like it's glass it's not and then there's a kind of inner box which then has relationship to the sky and to the views and then there's a very sort of varying set of systems that take you up through it the skin is parametrically tuned so that it actually has a movement in it it's compresses and opens to do with perspective and it's really talking about the nature in which you can bespoke industrialization now that actually the bespoken of industrialization now is the ability to tune elements in the kind of the old to the rational standardizing sort of sort of production of things to what you need the parametric tool can allow you to basically start to kind of make incredible geometries incredible shapes but using the efficiency of computers to allow you to not make waste so that you don't bring up the cost so these are standard units but they're they're cut through an efficiency diagram and actually if you start to notice the geometry expands up and down and moves across the space this is the library it's basically south-facing again and it has this very large canopy which basically projects over the entrance space and deals with a sort of gay and this is the skin of the building you see that the Diamonds become more vertical and compressed as you turn around the corner forests and the suburbs as you come close you start to see the form and you start to realize that these are actually just mirrors it's every other one is a mirror and when you get really close you start to see that it's mirror view mirror view and these are highly insulated volumes and that's how we get the 60% insulation and the skin the the whole ground plane is per for it so that we don't kind of over clog the drains in the city with massive amounts of runoff water by making hard surfaces and then when you go inside you realize it's a timber it's a wooden folly in the park so it's basically a giant lattice of plywood essentially Douglas fir plywood which has just been beautifully joined together and it's basically holding the glazing making spaces making that depth which is the contradiction of the sort of exterior and becomes the space for the enclosure this is looking back to the forest through the computer rooms sort of teaching sweets sort of educate you know a set of special acoustic Suites and it's amazing we see kids in here sitting with their computers sort of using these as kind of loungers just not designed but really exciting we brought in Senegalese Weaver's to make the lampshades so that was kind of incredible because the u.s. doesn't like importing things that are from not tested from Africa so that was a really tough one you can imagine but we managed to get these lampshades through I'm really proud of you can see those moment junctions so there's bending and really wanting to enjoy the bend and this idea of the this wooded forest almost play playful like us reticulated and this way which light and space and structure come together okay to show you the sequence because this is the bit I like the building basically on the forest side starts to just disappear as you move into the forest and you start to see how the movement of the form the glazing makes these soft curves and even in the autumn when you think it's going to become more glaring look it completely disappears and then the evening it's that Moscow Moscow is a probably the biggest project we've done to date a very challenging project and a very different climate for me I've sort of used to Europe and Africa but before this but moving north has been interesting and so what we were asked to do it was an international competition and we were very lucky to win it it's to build the a management school it doesn't have a Harvard Business School or an Indian management school you know when I won this competition that I was blown away by the heritage of Russia but it's such a shame that very little of it is actually real it's probably it's the beginning of our idea of what you know industrialization does you know to our sense of what modernism is comes from Russia comes from futurists comes from the constructivist etc but very little of its left you know except for things like Melnik offs extraordinary house which is basically a tiny little studio but something that's really powerful is tatlin and Alice's Keys drawings look at this this is really for me was the challenge as a student I said you know in the 80s I was like I want to build this one day and I think this is the project that started to do that for me the site was extraordinary if tatlin for me is the body of modernism with these forms malee average is the soul of emptiness and his kind of incredible studies of nothing and pure geometry is making composition that has some kind of meaning I thought that between these two poles is a kind of idea of modernity and what can we do with this it's ironic to me that these things exists on our continent and some things that I love and look at shrine structures in the yoruba weaving structures and their incredible ability to make abstraction and form I said that there's actually connections between all these things and I want to explore those this is Brezhnev's Russia incredible superstructures and obviously the Kremlin that you know which is really beautiful this is the site 27 acres malya which is buried here this is the site in the spring Moscow is beautiful like this for three months then it looks like this and I went this is my first site visit it's 12 foots worth of snow we disappeared into the first drop it was extraordinary and I'd never experienced that much snow in my life it was a really new experience for an african boy so we said you can't make a campus you can't make a quad you can't make a mark you know all those monastery types but you can make something that's similar to you know it has to be a kind of a new kind of building which is similar actually to the churches that were made in Russia the old churches which are basically giant wooden boxes but they had on top of them also this kind of idea of an architectural city an ideal city I also thought that that was really powerful I said basically let's make a hyper building a giant large-scale building which is 300 feet deep which organizes the entire school and is a kind of world and above it let's have a series of bars which has the education a hotel because the school is cross subsidized by a conference center which becomes the kind of premier conference center which pays for a lot of the sort of overheads and a sort of body building which is gyms swimming pool etc but I said let's make it because it's the first building in the site like a solar clock so it's basically about the orientation and the location this is the building in its landscape so you can see this massive form it's a kind of new giant form in its landscape it's kind of reverse so this is this form which is the clock so each unit has to have a break this is north this is the southern aspects here and basically the classrooms are between those so that you always have school view daylight school view daylight but also the light breaks through so you see the light through the day it comes through in slices and then in the North you have exhibition and conferencing and an up above that we basically use the brezhnev engineers to make super buildings like 300 foot long buildings with 125 meter cantilevers anyway this is the world that is basically the school it's almost like a colonnade because there's no end you're always going round and round there's no dead end in this project it was kind of a new experience for us you always go round and round and you always are kind of observing the views and this is kind of what a super scale building can sometimes allow which is something completely new and unexplored about that an architecture we have sort of urban architecture which is large but not single forms in the landscape of this kind of scale this is just showing you the programmatic way in which the school which is red uses it blue which is conference center and the green which is the back of house administration libraries etc this is the building in its context it's a drawing of light as well because the basically using parametric geometry it's basically concrete and glass all of this is truck weight bound concrete it's got a 2 meter deep foundation which creates the cantilevers these are 125 foot cantilevers and it's all tiled in glass it's basically four different colors of glass here for different colors glass there for the fur and it's basically this using parametric tools so just do it so it's as efficient as making a standard glass wall but it's a very different thing this is the West you'll see it this is South this is Mhairi richest burial I love this photo sucessor for me this is in the spring just how normal pictures are so you see the east and then you see the kind of way in which the stairs which are the forms bring you from the main space down into the public you park underneath when it's snowing sort of lobbies and then up into the main spaces we didn't do the main spaces we just organized the form but we kind of coordinated the key materials like white marble louvered about timber ceilings etc and then the giant skylights and then the auditorium which we did so the auditorium there are these large skylights in this 300 meters for because you want to how'd you get light in apart from the windows we made what we call I call them clouds these little clouds which are basically the way in which you bring lights down into the space so these are huge sort of floating forms that just kind of seem to meander across the space and then there's moments between the different schools classrooms and then the West it's the only building that's gold so it's a sunset so this is the Sun the Sun or the eat the the Western Sun hits this and it sort of refracts all over these buildings we put in an Olympic pool which the the Russian BAM sort of swimming troop sort of used so you can see them sometimes which is kind of fabulous the gymnasium and then up on the roof it's the south so this is the register these are the student blocks it's the main form and you see it's held on these just these two columns up and cantilever over and out the directors room he furnished it not us but he's so proud of it he sent me this image and I always use it in my lectures because he was so proud that he found an angled chair to match these windows this is the Smithsonian in Washington this brings us back to Washington I don't know if you know about the Smithsonian it's probably the largest cultural institution in the world they have 23 museums 12 of them are on the mall we're building I think the 24th yes this is I am Pei sort of masterpiece called the East Wing this is Gordon bunch shafts amazing structure this is the original first smithsonian and it houses all the cultural depository of america we're building the last museum on the mall which is supposed to kind of finish a plan made by an incredible master planner called L'Enfant who designed Washington we talked about the kind of essential components of culture being completed on the mall to represent the idea of this new land America so we are completing that master plan after 200 years it really single-handedly is about America fully understanding that in its history the experience of the african-american community is central it is the lens to understand the modernity which is and the perfection whatever you may say of it of America now so essentially it's kind of an amazing moment of going through civil rights the extraordinary artifacts right through to the agrarian sort of sort of slave slave trades as the slave kind of period in the sort of 17th and 18th century and even going back to Africa I in the proposal for this competition which was another international competition said that we had to make a new kind of building for this kind of Museum and it had to be a building which from its outset didn't speak of one language but spoke about the narrative of the journey as well as speaking to the place in West Africa at that time in the 17th century the Yoruba were the most powerful creative the highest art form you would say at the time they were making bronze Cass clay extraordinary figures that was not seen anywhere else on the continent their architecture created these caryatids which were like memorials to kings or kingdoms and when the King died this was him sort of enthroned on his horse and his sort of trusted guides and he always had a crown which is this so kind of triple had a crown it's almost like a Corinthian column and I said that this crown is extremely important it seems like nothing but actually it is the single signature that speaks of a certain kind of high order and I wanted to use that in arc in the making of America this architecture which we know which is a kind of hybrid of the classical colonial architecture was made by slaves and the first guilds in America were metalwork and woodwork trades after being freed from the land so this is the beginning of the professional class of the African American people these sort of incredibly direct sort of Ares and they made Charleston New Orleans etc right up to Washington this is Longhorns plan Lauren to build visited Europe and basically made a kind of version of Germany France and Italy this is the capital this is the mall this is the Titanic River this is the White House here which kind of deals with the kind of axes and then a series of principal monuments then the museums are planned to be here this is Washington in the winter its White House this is Washington's monument which is Carmack's Needle this is one of carnac's Needle so this is Egypt with Greek kind of architecture there's a kind of language of the kind of perfecting of classical architecture here this is our site the site kind of is coordinated around these very important monuments the mall the reflecting pool where Martin Luther King made is sort of Million Man sort of sort of speech they have I have a dream speech Lincoln is here Martin Luther King is here now Jefferson is here the White House is here the National Archive is here nuts Congress so it's a kind of hange moment and you can imagine the contestation this is the most contested project that I've ever worked on we spent three years getting it through the system where we have the building it's on site we said that it had to be a pavilion of this forum and it had to acknowledge these relationship it had to be a museum experience which at the same time as kind of delving you into content also related you to the place it had to be a building which also responded climatically because actually Washington is a swamp so this architecture of like shading is really really critical so basically in the end it's a cube which sits on a landscape which kind of coordinates paths you know all the way across the site the site was where a slave market used to be so the history galleries are basically buried under the sacred ground the history is immortalized in that site and then the major galleries are up above in the light the skin of the building is this Corona system it's another box within a box but the entire ground floor which is a 210 foot cube is open to the four directions of light this is a cross-section this is the south history galleries are here the section of the history gallery is the same as the section of the building 60 feet deep so you will go 60 feet deep rise into a chamber of light and rise up 60 feet and finish we said that well I wanted to kind of honor this the people who made these things so we use parametric tools to basically make a 21st century version of this these are the studies we made to kind of deal with the climate control in the environmental studies this is a one-to-one scale of the study and it's essentially a cast aluminium hybrid alloy cast aluminium switch super lights coated in liquid bronze and it looks like this so it is going to be a bronze hire new hybrid material which is the solar screen but also the kind of main sort of form of the building the interior is just turrets of stone and timber this is a cantilever that's 210 feet on two columns and a 60 foot projection tilting to create a bending reflecting pool so that this kind of we we work this out so this gives you we think between a five to ten degree temperature difference depending on the outside then the hall with the four directions of light is this free form of timber this frozen moment it's half a million pieces of timber and it's actually the number of African Americans who actually brought to America it so they were only half a million the rest went to the Caribbean and South America the 11 million slaves that left Africa only half a million went America thirty million african-americans exist now it will kind of memorialize an exhibit places you know it will have it goes across the entire range from history and will culminate in this chamber which I just I love very much which is basically the end of the history galleries where you basically have an oculus to the Washington Monument the first president of America and to the edge of the building and it's basically dedicated to Martin Luther King who basically said that the most beautiful thing about rainfall was letter it was like justice but justice is rain for the cleansing form of justice thank you

Channel: Design Indaba

Views: 30,173

Rating: 4.9341865 out of 5

Keywords: David Adjaye, Design Indaba Conference, Architecture & Interiors, Adjaye Associates., Moscow School of Management, Smithsonian in Washington

Id: 65tgWJYDkzE

Length: 43min 7sec (2587 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 08 2016