David Adjaye on 'Assembling a new landscape of experiences'

David Adjaye, Hon. AIA, OBE, principal director of London's Adjaye/Associates, was born in Dar-Es-Salaam, Tanzania, in 1966, the son of a Ghanaian diplomat. Adjaye grew up in London, where he trained at David Chipperfield Architects and Eduardo Souto De Moura Architects. In 1993, he graduated from the Royal College of Art and won the RIBA First Prize Bronze Medal. He was awarded the Order of the British Empire in 2007. The author of David Adjaye: Making Public Buildings, he recently gave the Hem C. Gupta Lecture at the Chicago Architecture Foundation to an enthusiastic audience of 400 mostly young professionals. Excerpts follow.

The Idea Stores, East London: Whitechapel is a highly diverse neighborhood. Fifteen languages are spoken here, and it has always been the place where immigrants to London were accepted.

This property is on the High Street, right where the daily market, mostly Bangladeshi, is held. The stalls have striped textile awnings, blue and white and green and white, and they became the metaphor for the blue and green striped glass of the civic architecture.

In Africa, the kente is a boxy cotton. Textiles can teach us something. Each “patch” within the fabric is unique, but it becomes a woven fabric that creates community, yet allows for diversity.

This building is not just a “depository” for books. It was conceived as a place where mind and body could come together. There are spaces for yoga and flower arranging and to learn motor mechanics, small rooms for community meetings and bigger spaces for weddings. It is open till 10 p.m., and mothers can leave their children off at the crèche.

Stephen Lawrence Centre, Deptford, South London: Stephen Lawrence was an 18-year-old black man who hoped to become an architect. He was knifed to death at a bus stop in 1993 [three white men were acquitted of the murder]. The Lawrence family set up a foundation to create an after-school educatorium for young people who hope to become architects.

The site was an old pumping station for the canal. The structure connects two forms, an inspirational space for media, performing arts, and workshops; the other for classrooms and administration. The metaphor I used was a beautiful gold box, so I clad the building in anodized aluminium with a silver laminate.

Nobel Peace Center, Oslo, Norway: The problem was that the Nobel Peace Prize had no place to “see” anything. There were very few artifacts. But Oslo hadn't figured out that they had this incredible “brand,” the Nobel Peace Prize, with its theme of “the understanding of peace through the understanding of conflict.” So the question became, How do you assemble data into a new landscape of experiences? The Dogon villages of Mali, with their open-topped rooms and many passages, became my metaphor.