Place, Identity, and Transformation | David Adjaye | Talks at Google

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[MUSIC PLAYING] SHIH HUA LIONG: Welcome, everyone. Thanks for coming. And welcome, David, to Talks at Google. DAVID ADJAYE: Thank you. SHIH HUA LIONG: Just a quick intro. David is one of the leading architects of his generation. I'm sure you've heard a lot about him in the news of late. One of the most significant projects I think that you've done to date, at least in the US, is the Smithsonian's National Museum of African-American History and Culture. And so would really love to talk to you a little bit more about that. I know you were born in Tanzania, come from a family of diplomats, you moved around a lot, lived in many different cities, and sort of have your base in London. Adjaye Associates has offices in London and New York, Berlin and Accra, right? DAVID ADJAYE: Yeah. SHIH HUA LIONG: And so we'd really love to hear a little bit more about your background and how that's sort of shaped you and your work today. DAVID ADJAYE: Well, I was born-- well, I'm not going to give you a date, [LAUGHS] but-- well, that doesn't matter. That's OK. But I was born at a time when Africa was really transforming from a colonial sort of continent to a country of independent sort of countries. And my father was part of that first generation of independence diplomats and politicians who were trying to make the country. And so I was born on the that soup of that change and this kind of old world, new world trying to forge a new identity. And my father was really part of that generation of diplomats that was then sent to Africa first, but then the world, to learn how to be diplomats of a state. And so my childhood was two years in a different city, six months, three months. And we went from-- my parents are [INAUDIBLE],, with just west Africa, but me and my brothers were born in east Africa, so Uganda, Kenya. And then we migrated up to north Africa, to the Middle East, and then to Europe. So by the time I was 13, I had sort of lived in nearly 15, 20 cities. SHIH HUA LIONG: And why did you choose London as your sort of home base? DAVID ADJAYE: I didn't choose it, my father chose London. My youngest brother-- we're all very different, competing. We're four boys, very competitive. But my youngest brother is mentally and physically handicapped. When he was five years old, he had a fever in Africa and it was incredibly difficult to deal with it. The temperature sort of flipped into sort of a really unsustainable level and he came out two weeks later with brain damage. So it happened when he was five and it was very traumatic for my family. And a way, it was the time that sort of shifted the dynamic of traveling in my family and my father. My father's career changed. He became local staff, rather than carrying on as a kind of career diplomat. And he chose London because predominately, we had gone to Anglophone schools, so English schools. So he decided that London was the right place for us to stay and to get the care that he needed for my youngest brother, the sort of best medical care that he could. SHIH HUA LIONG: And I feel like that really speaks to the core of who you are as an architect, right, in terms of the social responsibility of architecture and how it can transform our societies So talk to us a little bit about that. DAVID ADJAYE: No. I mean, in a way, that's the grounding which started my interest in the nature of space and space and society, space and citizens, space and freedom, space and accessibility. And it just came from a young child pushing a disabled brother around everywhere. And in the late '80, early '90s, disability were not around. So we would always be the family that were kind of pushing our brother to the back of a building and sort of yanking him up and getting people to sort of hold him to get him up into buildings because ramps weren't around. Very simple things like ramps and elevators that make level access for people, all these things weren't around. And it really got me incensed. And things like come respite centers for disabled people, places to have good care would be given, those are very ad hoc and horrible places with just sort of infrastructure that really slightly de-humanized the experience that was already a kind of traumatic experience for people without ability. And for some strange reason, architecture, I became very sensitized to it. And I decided that it wasn't just for me about aesthetics or monuments or anything like that, but it was also principally an approach problem-solving, but it's also about a kind of democratizing this knowledge to create the greatest opportunity for everyone so that architectural design is not just for an elite or for people who can afford things. It's not about the value of it, it's about the intellect. And if the intellect is what's being sold, then that should be able kind of be for everyone. We like to say in our office, we really believe that luxury should be for everyone. And we don't mean luxury as in gold, but luxury as the capacity to think should be for a project which is maybe making a cafe for a truck stop in the middle of nowhere as much as maybe working for you guys. It's the same. SHIH HUA LIONG: Absolutely. I think that's a really good segue to some of the work that you're doing here in New York with the Sugar Hill Housing Program in Harlem, which I'm quite familiar with because it's right down the road for me. So 125 units of affordable housing. DAVID ADJAYE: Yeah. SHIH HUA LIONG: Tell us a little bit about how you got that project and what it meant to you and you and even the motifs that you see at the front of the building. DAVID ADJAYE: Yeah. That was my first big competition in the city. And I really was very excited about it because essentially, the principal tenant of it was to deal with homeless housing in New York and to use design to really talk about how do you integrate-- homeless housing usually is seen as a blight on communities, people don't want to have it near their homes because they think it devalues their property, there's all this kind of stigma with the communities that are around it. And we said this was a very important project because it deals with a key and clear social issue and that actually, design can be used to coordinate, solve the problem of the sort of flow and movement that happens around these institutions in terms of different types of people, but also that we can also make an architecture that gives dignity to this community but is not expensive. It's also in that sort of low cost budget. And it was a big signature project for DeBlasio. It started at the end of Bloomberg's sort of administration and became DeBlasio's kind of signature project to talk about the importance of housing for all. So in a way, the architectural discussion at the time was about luxury buildings and ever more fantastical shapes, but actually the kind of more meaningful conversation was happening about, well, how do we get good design right to the people that need it most? Of the building really speaks to the history of its place in the sense that it talks about the fact that actually, that part of East Harlem was only 100 years ago seen as the countryside. It's very funny. It was farmland. SHIH HUA LIONG: Right. It was upstate. DAVID ADJAYE: It was upstate. That's where you got to get away from it all and now it's very much the island and the city. And so we wanted to kind of reference that. So we were referencing the great bucolic idea of kind of flower gardens. and there were many flower gardens up there at that time because Harlem is a Dutch word, it was a Dutch colony actually, that sort of formed that Upper Harlem. So I was very fascinated by that, this idea of a kind of Dutch farming sort of flowering kind of culture. So that's kind of embossed in the architecture. But it's also where Duke Ellington parked his car, it used to be a car park there all the time. And the building has about a 30% intake of musicians who, for some strange reason, are probably the largest group that become homeless. Because we see these kind of successful musicians, but there are so many that dedicate their lives and don't make it and sort of don't have family, fall out of the social structure, and end up on the street. And they're these incredibly talented people who have just fallen off the edge of society. So it sort of was interesting that the building is sort of filled with those characters so we wanted to make spaces where they could teach and support, that's part of the buildings program, that they can mentor young kids or do rich programs. There's a storytelling museum that we put in because we also wanted to not have a building like this not be near culture because it's usually the furthest thing away for this community to be near culture. So we brokered with the city and with the sort of cultural institutions to create a children's storytelling museum in the building so that there's continual life coming and the arts are celebrated there. The performing arts are there, that's a little bit of commercial space but very, very little. SHIH HUA LIONG: And the preschool. DAVID ADJAYE: And there's the preschool, which is a very, very important component to have very high quality preschool offering right in the building. And the third part which, is not fully activated, is that there's a kind of farmer's market that kind of sometimes comes to the plaza. But actually, we got zoning from Amanda Burton to allow urban farms to be on the roof of the residents so they can have their own allotments on the roof, which we're working on now. So really, the building is a kind of a total ecology and really, these are people who are just getting their first homes of families are single people. And it's meant to show that this can be a transmitory part and a kind of dignified part of our city. It doesn't have to feel like it's some negative. SHIH HUA LIONG: Absolutely. And you talk a lot about some of the artists and you've worked with a lot of artists. I know in Harlem, you're also working on the Studio Museum. So tell us a little bit about what that project entails and how it's going to sort of transform that neighborhood. DAVID ADJAYE: Yeah. So where we were, the Sugar Hill project is on a 155th, so up in sort of East Harlem. But the Studio Museum in Harlem is really the beginning of the sort of black Renaissance arts movement in the US, really sort of at the moment of the civil rights kind of emancipation moment. So it's really their 50th anniversary right now. And they were basically an agency to deal with the racism in the arts. It's really sort of secluded a lot of white artists and sculptors from coming into the mainstream because it just wasn't seen to be what they should be-- they weren't considered part of the canon. So there were many artists that were actually collaborating with many white artists as young sort of practitioners. But then as their careers blossomed, the black artists were kind of left behind and the white artists kind of rose. And intellectually, there was a lot of kind of fertile sort of relationship between these two organizations. As And so the Studio Museum was born to kind of collect this group and not to let them get lost and to also make sure that there was agency and support for this community. So it started off very much as a very low budget thing, just very simple spaces. Then they got the building on 125th through the city, brokering a deal with them to give them a cheap rent. And then Max Bond, an amazing architect, refurbished it and created three very large rooms to show work. And more or less, that was maybe in the sort of '60s and that has lasted till now. And space has been falling apart. But last year there was a big competition in the city and internationally. We won the competition to rebuild it. And the idea is to really turn it into the premier arts destination in the north of the city, so away sort of off the Museum Mile, but up on 125th, very close to Apollo. And really, 125th is changing dramatically. But it's lot of commercial sort of business is coming and there's very little cultural anchors. So places like the Apollo, places like the Studio Museum become very important to the city because the anchor a certain continuity. So we are making a building which tries to create in a way that the Whitney created something in '77, a cultural anchor, that could have just become a kind of residential area completely. But that cultural anchor defined the way in which that center works. We're hoping that by creating a significant cultural offering of exhibition spaces, lecture spaces, public engagement education kind of programs which are very important and studios for artists, what they became famous for is that they incubated artists and gave them a year or two years' studio space to perfect their work as residents. And so that program will still continue, so there will be artist-in-residence programs still going on there. And this will become a kind of major arts destination on 125th. And we're working with the city, sort of quite a way into it, we'll be starting on site next year to really build this very significant building, which will hopefully create an anchor on 125th and then carry the story on in a kind of much more powerful way. SHIH HUA LIONG: Wonderful. We look forward to seeing that in New York. DAVID ADJAYE: I think they're releasing images in the fall. SHIH HUA LIONG: Oh, great. So we talked about sort of social housing, the arts. I want to sort of turn the focus a little bit on libraries and access to information. Libraries have really become the-- well, used to really be the focal point of a community for information. I know you've worked on the libraries in the UK, the two ideas. DAVID ADJAYE: [INAUDIBLE], yes. SHIH HUA LIONG: Tell us about the challenges around that and how you've been able to sort of transform. DAVID ADJAYE: Yeah. Well, it's interesting because the two projects that I won really at the beginning my career, sort of 2002, were at that moment when the internet really was becoming something that was clearly going to change our world or our lives and was starting to impact the typology of certain institutions like libraries. And so there was a lot of discussion at that time and everybody said, well, libraries are going to disappear and everything's going to be on their laptops. And to a certain extent, it's completely changed, but libraries haven't disappeared. But they have completely changed because in a way, if you think about the library, we think of libraries sort of in a romantic sense in terms of academic and historical libraries. But libraries for normal people, citizens in the city, really happened post-war in almost all Western cities. It really was after the war that there was a systematic program to make boxes with books, and usually a certain amount of books which gave you a sort of body of knowledge. And that was the way in which every suburb had something, and that was the first thing out of libraries outside of the university or the kind of great sort of institutions. So it's really a modern typology, but one that very quickly became-- SHIH HUA LIONG: Died down. DAVID ADJAYE: Yeah, died down. It shrunk. But also it became something that became a very important way for families and communities to have access to the sort of-- it became a first device to democratize knowledge, really. But in doing that, also what it did-- apart from just democratizing knowledge-- it also became a multigenerational institution for communities. Because as communities, we basically stay away from different generations naturally. We stay with our tribes, our age groups. And places like libraries are actually one of the few places where multi-generations come together. You see young kids, you see teens, you see toddlers, grandma and grandpa. And actually, what we've all realized is that these are really powerful social incubating spaces. So the competition entry was to say that the library, yes in terms of the information has shifted, but actually the idea of that kind of destination in the community that brings multi-generations together is even more necessary in a world where we are now tapped into things and in a world where things are very expensive for certain families and our kind of notion of the unit of the family structure has changed. The library has to do more. It has to become a place where maybe a single parent family can allow their kids to stay till 11 o'clock, not just open as a kind of nine to five or nine till seven. It has to kind of offer language classes maybe or motor mechanics or learning massage, it has to offer computer skills. So actually, what it started to do was it started to melt what we're calling lifelong learning with library services and the notion of a community center. And so the libraries that you're seeing now, we prototyped those two at that time and we won a lot of awards for it and started talking about it. And there have been a lot of big signature projects that were done, but those were the first to community sort of transformations that really showed the library world that they could work. And it suddenly just mushroomed around the world. We had all these library people coming to London to learn and it's really had this incredible effect all over the world. And I was also then brought sort of almost a decade later to Washington to also then kickstart their program when then Mayor Anthony Williams came to London to see the libraries, called me, and wanted me to go talk to his library team. And we built two libraries in Washington, as well. And it was, again, helping them understand this model and really bring that into making a kind of signature building which becomes an important community hub. And it's amazing when we opened these buildings, people thought, oh, nobody's going to go. They're so full, they're oversubscribed and people are being pushed out when they want to close. It's actually the reverse. We realized that actually with the kind of accessibility we have, we also now crave sort of powerful spaces that allow us to have a kind of social life that's meaningful beyond a retail mall or street, sidewalk. SHIH HUA LIONG: Right. And you talk about how the library has also started to attract sort of teenagers, where it's the spot to go to is let's meet at the library. DAVID ADJAYE: That was actually our benchmark of success. We said if we could attract young teenagers to meet in the library, rather than at a retail mall, then we were winning. SHIH HUA LIONG: Absolutely. DAVID ADJAYE: And that was the test, and thankfully it did happen. SHIH HUA LIONG: So I'm glad you mentioned Washington. With your significant sort of signature project there, I'm sure the audience also love to hear about just the process of how you started the project, also the significance of the crown at the National History of African-American Culture and History. DAVID ADJAYE: Well, that museum is really a project sort of I guess 200 years in the making, philosophically, and 20 years to really bring to fruition. And it's the last possible site on the monumental core of Washington. The Mall is divided into two sections, if you don't know it. It's basically the museums that go up to the Capitol from 15th and Constitution Drive. If you don't know DC, it's basically a cruciform and one part of the cruciform is very strict, very French, very ordered with lots of museums. The Science and History Museum is there, there sort of Hirshhorn is there, the Smithsonian Castle, the American Museum et cetera. And then on the other side, you have the monuments of the nation and it's much more in a kind of English landscape. And it's taken 200 years to build this. And actually, when the plan was made, there was a kind of petition to have a museum that talked about the African-American experience and its contribution to America, but it was dismissed as not relevant. And so it's the last building that can possibly be built on the Mall in terms of its master plan. All the institutional buildings have been built and the monuments are full. They have to find places to make new monuments, which is why the Vietnam Memorial is so powerful. It was kind of discovering a new way of doing it. And we've just completed the last site, which seemed like the worst site because it's half the size of all the other museums. But in a way, the position of it is so powerful that it allowed us to do something that maybe we couldn't have done if we had a different site. So the museum is really trying to talk about the story of the African-American sort narrative from really the Declaration of Independence, the declaration of emancipation to now. So really, there's a kind of journey from the 14th century, so there's a kind of moment to think about the impact of slavery and the kind of commercialization of human trade and how America's foundations are in that, but then really how this community evolves out of that kind of trauma, moved through incredible movements which shift the legislation and the mood of this country-- and it's ongoing, as we know-- and how that really allows you to understand the identity of the African-American here but also to understand the identity of America. It's not just a museum for the community, it's actually an American museum which really helps you to understand fundamentally how America is made. And its narrative for us was that it really also cements the relationship between Africa and the Americas. Because by the slave trade, you have this kind of incredible relationship that is sort of formed. And so we said that we didn't want to just make a museum which is maybe just to make a kind of Greek temple and then fill it with artifacts or a palace or a fabulous building. We thought that with this building in being so late but being so important should really be from its very silhouette be a narrative about the story. So in a way, it contributes both in terms of its aura in its landscape as a monument, but also then as a museum educating in its content. And that kind of very decision was what distinguished us from our peers because we were able to present a narrative about how you make form, which was about speaking from the silhouette to the very smallest thing inside the building, that everything is kind of part of the content of understanding this narrative, everything is asking you questions. So when we opened the building, people were like, well, what is this? And so the storytelling started then. It's inspired by Benin caryatid shrine structures in West Africa. Why? A large part of the community comes from there. Because it was commercial trade, it was meticulously documented, shockingly. No data about people's names or tribes or anything, but the content-- the ships' cargo. So we know where the ships came from and what they did, so we know the areas. And so we made a fiction about that time, the 14th century, what would be the great things that people would know about from west and central Africa? And they would all know about the Yoruba of Benin because they were the greatest craftsmen. They were the Greeks of Europe, so they were the Greeks of west Africa. They were the best casters, the best woodworkers, and the employers or the courts and empires that were around. There was a lot of intermarrying. So we said, well, OK, let's look at the best arts from that place and let's see if we can use that as a reference to say, this would be one of the kind of high points of kind of an artistic kind of moment that would be a memory. And then let's kind of create a hybridity, which is the African-American experience between Africa and America, but then talking about the experience of then sort of coming from the roots of the South, the agrarian landscape, working the land, building the infrastructure of the country, labor. And we wanted to look at sort of the kind of beautiful traditions of ironworking, ironsmithing, which was something that a lot of-- if you weren't in the military or a carpenter or on the field, ironsmithing was a very important labor that actually built a lot of South-- railway buildings, et cetera. And a lot of African-American slaves in kind of their first sort of when they became free went into artsmithing as trades. So we wanted to honor that. We particularly looked at somebody from Charleston who now is becoming very well-known as one of the kind of great ironsmiths of his time, Philip Simmons. And I took one of his metal ironworks and sort of mapped it and created a screen from the mapping, literally, to create sort of what looks like an ornamental pattern. But it's actually really a redrawing of this man's work as a kind of way to hybridize the corona form and to create the nature of labor in the kind of detail of the building. So that became a kind of way to kind of make kind of a very complicated skin which is environmentally responsive. We're the first gold LEEDs building on the Mall. I know it's shocking, but we recollect our water, we're sustainable. And then really because the building concept was to put 50% of the building underground and then to create two special chambers up above and to create a narrative where you go down 80 feet and then you rise up, which is not a normal museum narrative. In fact, all the museum people said, this will never work because you should go into a lobby, it should be grand, and then you go into rooms like the Met. And we said, no. SHIH HUA LIONG: Rethinking it. DAVID ADJAYE: Yeah. So we rethought this and in a way, we buried history in the ground. And then we talked about the first professional class being in the upper level and then the sort of performing arts and entertainment being above that. And then we created also the end of the project to draw people the best view of the entire Mall at the top, where you have a window which gives you views all the way to Arlington and right to the Capitol. And it's the only place where you can get this incredible overview. So we turned the building into a sort of bit of a sort of a tower, a ziggurat, that you sort of climb, a journey that you go from the ground up to the top. And in doing the work, our instincts were sort of proven right because we placed it in the ground and there was a slave market just behind the White House on this site, which was astonishing when we find out the history. So we sort of in a way by not building on one sit e putting things underneath it, we sort of kept the kind of sacred relationship to that land. It's a place where everybody arrives on the north side and waits and there's a kind of water pool that just kind of celebrates that idea. So the building is full of narratives. We could keep talking about it for a long time, but it's something that I would encourage people to experience. SHIH HUA LIONG: Definitely. Thank you for sharing that. I'll just cover one more question and we can open it up to the audience. So you were born in Africa, you've lived there for a long time, you're doing a lot of work there. Tell us about what key projects are happening in Africa and perhaps some of the challenges in working there. DAVID ADJAYE: Challenges, there are a lot. So there's a kind of second wave of a sense of kind of developed, especially in central and west Africa, and also in east Africa now, and their governments are trying to deal with very difficult-- these are nations that are only 50 years old. We think of Africa with its great history, but in terms of its modern history, its modernity, it's really new. And just as the civil rights were happening here, that's when actually African independence was happening and kind of new identities were being formed. So the first wave was very interesting, people like [INAUDIBLE] building incredible infrastructure, et cetera. But really, it pitted out and got quite a lot of problems in terms of power and opportunity, all the sort of things that beginning states have. But there is a kind of movement now where economies are getting more robust, people are starting to learn how to kind of work within a globalized world. And certain leaders now have understood that architecture is very much part of that, that architecture and infrastructure have to be brought together. So I'm working for the Ghanian government right now helping to develop their rail infrastructure system for the country, talking about nodal sort of points and how we develop terminals that celebrate sort of civic life. In Dakar, I'm working with the World Bank to kind of put their infrastructure directly in the continent and not just have it in America, but to have it on the ground so that the countries that are being served actually have a kind of base there. In places like Gabon, I'm helping the government maser of the campus to kind of have a much more smart government campus where people can find things and relate to things. So it's like these are fundamental things, but these are nation-building things that are really fascinating to me, as well. So that's why I have an office and Accra to deal with that. SHIH HUA LIONG: And we talked about it earlier this afternoon, how working in Africa, working with governments now is sort of really at the core, right, of who you are and sort of your vision of sort of civic experience and transformation. DAVID ADJAYE: It feels very privileged to be able to have that opportunity because I mean, my work in London and in New York has generally tended to be much more the private sector. But now in London also, I'm now the mayor's design advocate, so I'm now sort of supporting in a political role the shaping of the city and the next sort of iteration of the mayor's sort of time. So that would be much more into a kind of philosophical realm of how London is going to develop. But in the US, it's been working with cultural institutions, but in a sense private [INAUDIBLE].. So to suddenly go full steam into more the political realm feels daunting. It's felt very daunting to start off with because it's really something we're not trained to do, so the logistics of that have been a quick a very steep learning curve. But what they create from us is the way we think and the way we problem-solve. I would say aesthetics come from the problem-solving. We are obsessed with aesthetics, but we're obsessed with aesthetics as a solution to problem-solving. So I always say to my team, we solve the problem and then derive the aesthetics out of it. We don't create the aesthetics and try and solve the problem. SHIH HUA LIONG: Absolutely. Great. Thank you. And the other thing I told you about was the best part of the talks is really opening it up to the audience. So would you like to start and introduce yourself? AUDIENCE: My name is Florian. It's super cool that you're here, so thanks for making time. I have two questions. The first is as you talked about storytelling, I recently watched Chimamanda Adichie's Ted talk about single narrative and I know that she talks about how collectively Africa, right, has suffered from this. And I think we see a lot of that narrative in the US around our black population here. Your work at the Smithsonian is in many ways centered on creating a second narrative, right, but that's not the work of an architect alone. So I'm curious about your collaborative process and that with other artists and how that influenced the process of structuring that space. And the second is about the location of the museum. So it's important to have this recognized in our nation's capital, obviously. But as I look at an organization like the Equal Justice Initiative and the building of a first memorial to the history of [INAUDIBLE] lynching in this country, there is an equal importance to local recognition, right? If you could speak to anything that you're aware of perhaps this being the beginning of more of these developments elsewhere in the US, that would be interesting. DAVID ADJAYE: Two great questions. I'll start with the last and go backward. I mean, I think that there is definitely now an awareness that we move in the 20th century from objects, artifacts, or just expressions of beauty to narratives, that actually the narratives of people as we move to metropolitan cities all over the world that become very powerful mixing places becomes very important because the notion of how we all come together and how we make relationships to each other is more profoundly important in the 21st century than it's ever been in the history of our humanity. Because we're now coming closer than we've ever been, we actually spend a lot of time getting away from each other and forming our groups how we're like slamming back together. And so in that's sort of coming together, where are our strands of how we come together is critical. So I think that there's a lot of thought about how to kind of talk about these issues and how to also create ways for different generations to kind of lock into that and understand how to use that to help them in the way they are and the kind of metropolitan condition. I can't speak specifically to the project you're talking about because I don't have information on it, but I know that just in my work that I'm doing that this is really a big conversation. With the museum, say the-- AUDIENCE: The other one is about collaboration. DAVID ADJAYE: Oh, collaboration, yeah. So there are 36 consultants, there are four architects that were doing this but we were the lead team. When you're working on these incredibly complex projects where you're working with the government, the local authority, community stakeholder groups, what we've decided is that these things are just too much for one architect to work with. So we develop a multi-headed system where my partners would work on different aspects of the either legislation, contract, specific ways of building, et cetera, et cetera. And so we sort of put ourselves into specializations and then became a kind of team that would then deliver that thing. We didn't work on this project with any artist specifically on the building fabric or anything like that. That was actually [INAUDIBLE] our job. So we were the sort of artistic lead and the architectural lead and then we worked with [INAUDIBLE] Group, an amazing team from North Carolina, who delivered our delivery on the ground. And we were based in London, we were just setting up a New York office here. The Smith Group, who were the only people that built on the Mall in the last 20 years, so we were like, we need somebody who has done this because you're dealing with the federal government. We worked with Davis Brody Bond, Max Bond, his ex-partner, because they had been one of the few people that had work on sub-underground buildings. Which we knew were going to build a building that was 80 feet down and they had just completed the World Trade Center. So we wanted that intelligence, we didn't want to learn it again. We knew that the site that we were on was basically a backfilled. It was a canal, it was a swamp that was dredged, and it was a canal used to bring the stones to build the Capitol and all the other buildings. So we knew that we were actually putting ground on a soggy site. And we were developing-- usually as an architect, you develop a foundation of the boat, we knew that we were developing almost a submarine. We have to develop and double-walled system to deal with that. So we had to kind of bring in intelligence so that we didn't make many mistakes. But that's giving you a sense. And then with the content, we were the kind of overarching architects in terms of coordinating how the spatial kind of narrative worked, but Applebaum were the people who did the detail of the sonography of the exhibition design. It was their concept and vision. So really, what you see in terms of narrative and the specific content is Ralph Applebaum, who worked collaboratively with the team. So it's a very multi-headed system, but it's really exciting because you get this incredible intelligence from different places coming together to form this thing. Hi Hi. A question for you about construction technology. As steel girder construction and reinforced concrete really kind of radically changed the way architecture worked in the last century, what kind of new upcoming construction technologies do you see that will make sort of the next radical shift in what cities and buildings look like overall? DAVID ADJAYE: Yeah. This is the big questions that are emerging right now. I don't think we are 100% clear about what they are. But we know things like if arc welding and steel and concrete, as you said, literally radically transformed the skyline by creating verticality-- essentially, it created verticality and the ability to brace and stiffen the structure as you went up. The sort of things that are happening right now is that with elevators, for instance, we're on the precipice for the first time of elevators that no longer just go up and down but can go sideways, up, down, and around things. That sounds like nothing, but that literally is a phenomenal breakthrough which suddenly means that we can create scale and operation in a way that actually nobody could even imagine. And those are some of the things that are being thought about right now. And these new types of elevators are being prototyped, they're just starting to come onto the market. Mayor Bloomberg has just put a set in his building in London and they're really extraordinary things. Obviously, there's technology [INAUDIBLE] integrated systems make smart, responsive buildings. So the building is not an inert thing, it's something that starts to become, as it were, it has an ability to sense its environment and respond, both to the people in it and the environment outside. So we're able to make buildings that are, I think, much more specific now and the century is going to show more of that. And I think with that, it means that we can make buildings that are much more clearly related to their geography, which is a big problem the 20th century couldn't do. We were just very much about creating big clunky things, sealing them, pumping air in them as much as possible, and hoping that everybody stayed in sort of temperature ranges. Well, we're now going to be able to make buildings which actually are able to breathe differently in different climates, different altitudes; be able to kind of use the material science of those places to kind of reinforce their making maybe in terms of their fabric, their wall constituency. And we're then going to be able to make in the 21st century geometries that you could only imagine as drawings in the way that maybe the constructivists imagined drawings at the beginning end of the 19th century, early 20th century that became buildings at the end of our 20th century. So I'm giving you a sort of mixed answer because I think that the next 25 years is going to reveal a lot, but we are at-- the precipice has already seen that it's really radical going to change. We can do density in a way that people cannot imagine and that's already up upon us. We're just starting it and it's going to get more. AUDIENCE: Thank you. DAVID ADJAYE: Thank you. AUDIENCE: Hello. DAVID ADJAYE: Hi. AUDIENCE: My name is [? Onome ?] and I had a question about the problem-solving process for you and your team. So one of things you said that really struck me was you focus on solving the problem for the community and then do this aesthetic around that. But from your work, you're solving problems for different kinds of communities-- for London, for New York, Washington and now you're working in Dakar and Accra. So how exactly is that problem-solving and creative process when you're working on solving problems for different kinds of people, different kinds of communities? DAVID ADJAYE: Yes. It's about being out in the field. One of the things that I made a very early decision was that we're not a huge company and we could just stay in London and just send people out and do things. But I decided very early on that if we were going to be in a continent, then we would invest in placing a team there so that we could actually have on the ground information but also develop relationships on the ground. So the reason for having a New York office, the reason for having an office in Accra is because we want to be much more connected and we want to be able to be responsive in the way in which we kind of create the kind of-- what you need, essentially, in those collaborations is the ability to have dialogue and to have dialogue and response and to then replay and then to have dialogue and response. In a way, design is a kind of process of talking it through and learning the lessons, articulating them, see if it works, and then kind of expanding up again. So it becomes like a kind of vortex that's growing bigger until you get some solution. So that sort of cyclical kind of journey is really important to have continuity and not to have a sort of disconnect that I feel like having one central office where you fly in and out of crates you're kind of still in your world and you sort of feel almost like a space man kind of landing somewhere, but you're insulated. Whereas I want people to be almost as it we're native, breathing the air that everybody else is breathing and being in that context. It's profoundly important. And it seems like nothing, but actually, it's amazing. On the three continents, the work that comes out of the studio is very different. And it's very interesting. I'm the kind of main person, but because it's not about an aesthetic kind of then overwriting and saying, this is the look of Adjaye Associates, it's coming from the solutions that we have to make to deal with the problems that we're encountering. The work is emerging differently, and for me that philosophically confirms a sort of deeper belief that architecture of the built environment should respond much more to the geography in terms of the kind of terra firma, but also to the culture that is emerging. It should find its aesthetics, find its notion through a kind of bigger sort of thinking about how you do things, but it should find its resolution in the way it expresses itself in different places. So for me, I'm in the experiment also. So I'm sort of half kind of clear, but already know the results that I have make me believe that it's really the right way. AUDIENCE: Thank you. SHIH HUA LIONG: Question. AUDIENCE: Hey. DAVID ADJAYE: How are you doing? AUDIENCE: How are you doing? My name is Kevin. And first of all, when I just want to thank you for showing up and all that you've contributed to the many communities that you've been fortunate enough to work in and serve, in a sense. And I also want to thank you for being able to work in Harlem and developing a space in which people can come into and the adjacent neighborhoods can feel OK with that structure to serve those certain individuals living there comfortably, as well. But then I'm starting to realize after being born and raised in New York City for quite some time, areas like Spanish Harlem, Harlem, you're starting to see things. The people who made Harlem are no longer there, right? We're starting to-- we're on this line of gentrification. And even most recently, Realtors are kind of trying to rename Harlem into SoHa. SHIH HUA LIONG: There's an article in the "New York Times" about that. AUDIENCE: Harlem not only represents a neighborhood or a part of Manhattan; it represents a culture, it represents a way of life, it represents a history, it represents a past. How do you as an architect feel when you're developing these spaces and you can kind of see it not fitting those people that you necessarily designed it for? For me personally, it kind of hurts where I have to take my daughter on trips to these neighborhoods to show her but we can't necessarily live in them and I have history in this neighborhood. How does that make you feel? DAVID ADJAYE: Yeah. There it is. OK. Let me be brief and give you [INAUDIBLE].. The dilemma of the city is that it's not static. It's a horrible thing. But if you look at the evolution of cities, it is permanently in flux. We are actually never static. So there's that dilemma to deal with. So the city doesn't belong to any generation, it's always belongs to the future or it dies. So there's that problem. And it's a horrible one, but it's one that one has to face. The second thing is this notion of gentrification, which has become a bit of a kind of easy bashing thing, people bash it. There's two things, there's entrepreneurial opportunity, which is when planning laws relax certain things to activate entrepreneurs to kind of do development. That's one thing. It's actually very controllable because the city has the power to do it. But there's this idea of gentrification, which actually is problematic. But actually, the statistic shows that only 10% of construction is about gentrification. We looked into it and we were like, oh my god, this is horrible, it's taking over the whole [INAUDIBLE].. Then we looked at the numbers and we were like, oh my god. It's actually these hot spots, but they become the stories and they become the overriding narratives that kind of blanket out everything else. So these communities don't completely disappear, but they change and they upgrade. There are certain benefits. Certain families live in very difficult situations and that uptake of money allows them to buy homes in places where-- so it's a very kind of complicated dynamic that actually does good. It does some harm because it changes these communities. And I think as planners, architects I always say that when you come in, you have to work with history. As a design, I'm like, it doesn't work if you don't start from history and move into the future. If you just start in the future, it's sort of an isolated bubble. It's like a spaceship that just lands. Spaceships are fun, I love spaceships. But cities are a continuum, they've been going for 10,000 years, right? That's the history of cities. It goes back to that's the earliest that we know, about 10,000 years old. And it's a kind of technology, it's a kind of mechanism that continually is growing and adding to itself. So one is struggling with this thing. But I think that it's implicit that architecture pays attention to that notion of history, and urbanists do, and to find a way to always grow it to the next thing. Because we have to evolve it and we have to grow it, but there are ways to do that. And that has to become much more the norm. I mean, I'm hoping that by the end of my career when I'm no longer around, but actually the methods that I use are just not even anything that some people say, wow, that's so interesting and radical. It's like, this is basic. It's like, oh, yeah, I mean, just that's whatever. We just talk about history and stuff because that's what we do. It's like, OK, success. Yeah. SHIH HUA LIONG: Thank you. One more question. AUDIENCE: Hi. I'm Matt. Hey. Something you said at the start really resonated with me, and that was the idea of for everyone in access and so on. It's something leaders here say a lot when they talk about the scale about technology and so on. And I'm wondering if you've got as a company the staff to do engineering and now we have a lot design people to work with, people from those fields, and look at process and so on. As we create objects that now are in people's homes, as well as through the internet and on devices and so on, if you've got any words of advice for how we might think about designing systems and their relationship to people and how we keep so we're making hardware that gets more and more expensive-- this is like a $600 phone-- how we keep that open and accessible and we still retain that for everyone idea at the heart of what we do. DAVID ADJAYE: It's a huge challenge and it's really at the heart of the struggle in the modern world. The purpose of technology is to democratize information and systems and to kind of bring us to a point where we're able to do things in this collective, right? But there's these difficult things to do with inequalities and imbalances that create these problems. And so there isn't a kind of moment which I think is the solution that solves it, but there's always this constant struggle of trying to always turn the scales which are kind of in balance back to kind of parallel. And I think that's the game, right? So if it is about always struggling to straighten the thing, then what do you do to always democratize the work? So if you're making the high thing, what are you doing also at that other end? So in a way for me, we always look about in the studio that you've got to work in balance. So we may be working for a very wealthy person, but also we want to work for somebody who really can barely pay for our fees and we want to give the same brain power to that person that we're doing there. So that in a way, we're making inequity. For us, that's the way to bring the thing into equity. It's harder in products because you have a product that has a kind of definition of the thing. But I think that as a company, it's about what the entire totality kind of achieves. And we haven't got to a place in our society where we no longer care about the value of our product. I look forward to that-- I mean, it won't be my time. But it would be great to get to a time when product is no longer relevant, right? It's like, whatever. We have bigger things to think about than the value of the things that are things. That would be a profound moment, right. Yeah. SHIH HUA LIONG: Great. David, thank you so much for coming. It's an honor to have you here at Google today and we hope to see you again in the future. DAVID ADJAYE: Great. Thank you so much. SHIH HUA LIONG: Thank you. [APPLAUSE]
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Channel: Talks at Google
Views: 22,366
Rating: 4.8551531 out of 5
Keywords: talks at google, ted talks, inspirational talks, educational talks, architect, african architecture, David Adjaye, david adjaye interview, david adjaye architect, architecture, design, architecture and design
Id: njBCgXmjCpI
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Length: 49min 43sec (2983 seconds)
Published: Fri Sep 08 2017
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