After thirteen years on the books and seven years on the drawing boards, the Smithsonian National Museum for African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) opened on September 24, 2016, to a speech from President Obama and a crowd of thousands. Designed by British-Ghanaian architect David Adjaye in collaboration with Philip Freelon and the Bond/Smith group, the new museum is a much-awaited, mesmerizing addition to the National Mall in Washington, DC.
It is also a testament in bronze to David Adjaye’s prowess as a translator. As a designer, he deals in conversions: translating his varied influences into his projects, expressing his ideas on a spectrum of scales, rendering lived experiences in the textures of building material. As Adjaye himself says, there is always a context, though it is a shifting one. Roving between these shifting reference points and his own work, the British-Ghanaian architect leaves a trail of breadcrumbs that connect textile and façade, table and building, in intriguing ways.
The Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, designed by David Adjaye. Photograph: Alan Karchmer/Smithsonian NMAAHC.
This is not to say that Adjaye is purely concerned with source material. Whether in furniture or architecture, his projects emit a quiet newness, an aware but unpronounced sense of difference. As interpretations go, they are both loosely and firmly tied to the original points of inspiration. In his design for the NMAAHC, these historical influences appear at the surface but bow to the museum’s own weighty narrative.
Winning a 2009 competition for the new Smithsonian as part of the Freelon Adjaye Bond/SmithGroup team, Adjaye's development of the museum design coincided with his collaboration with Knoll on two separate collections of furniture and textiles—the Washington Collection and the David Adjaye Collection. But about cross-cutting themes in his work, the architect is frank: “The formal language is shared with some of the buildings I am currently working on,” he said of the addition of the Prism™ Lounge Chair, Ottoman, and Side Table to his furniture collection. “There is a common line of inquiry, and it has presented an opportunity to express my position in terms of materials, silhouettes, and forms.”
“The formal language is shared with some of the buildings I am currently working on. There is a common line of inquiry, and it has presented an opportunity to express my position in terms of materials, silhouettes, and forms.”
—David Adjaye
The Washington Collection for Knoll™ by David Adjaye.
Joining a collection of furniture that uniquely focused on monumentality and materiality, the Prism™ line embodies the architect’s belief in an undifferentiated spectrum of design, wherein certain elements might be multiplied or manipulated, depending on the problem to be solved. This results in invariable, if fuzzy, connections between the projects Adjaye works on at a given time, one feeding into the other feeding back into the first. “The connections are not linear,” he said, reflecting on the relationship between the Washington Collection and the Smithsonian museum, but “a narrative about skin, form, and structure” became common to both.
Speaking to the Cooper Hewitt Design Museum about his work with KnollTextiles, Adjaye elaborated on the nature of creative give-and-take. “Creative collaboration with artists and designers from different disciplines is not only very stimulating for me but it opens up a discourse about the art of making things that often provides sources of inspirations for my building designs,” he said.
“I have never drawn distinction between the world of art and the practice of architecture; they are intrinsically linked.”
—David Adjaye
The Adjaye Collection for KnollTextiles by David Adjaye.
“These textiles are very much geared toward space making and atmosphere; considering geometry, material and texture for these purposes shares a certain design logic with architecture," he elaborated. "This is why I have never drawn distinction between the world of art and the practice of architecture; they are intrinsically linked. However, architecture is an inherently public endeavor—the successes and failures of each stage are highly visible.”
The NMAAHC is more visible than your average civic building. Given the fraught history it holds, the new museum on the National Mall reflects its purpose in its physical appearance on a level more overt than most contemporary cultural architecture. In Form, Heft, Material, Adjaye described it as "one of the few examples in [his] work where the external expression includes references to history."
"Conceptually," he wrote, "it is about the identity of a marginalized group that has played, and continues to play, a very significant role in the United States. The National Mall represents the body of the nation and the new building will complete that image.”
The Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, designed by David Adjaye. Courtesy of Adjaye Associates.
“With the pyramid pointing the other way, it represents death and the ground, but in Washington, DC, we are using it the other way, up, as a celebration—the provisional conclusion to a long history.”
—David Adjaye
Situated between the Washington Monument and the National Museum of American History, the NMAAHC has plenty of reference points to begin with—and deviate from. Adjaye cited Gordon Bunschaft’s Hirshhorn Museum and IM Pei’s East Building as modernist cousins of the new building, but underscores that his is a modernism defiantly extracted from the grip of a Eurocentric canon.
The building’s form was inspired by an early twentieth-century Yoruba sculpture depicting a slim, crowned figure. Adjaye translated the corona atop the figure into a functional space, stretching its dimensions, matching its slope to that of the towering obelisk nearby on the Mall, and adding complexity in surface finishing. “The pyramid is actually inverted, creating an upward trajectory, and when we conducted a survey, we discovered that it is a form that is associated with uplift and is etched in the collective memory,” Adjaye wrote. “With the pyramid pointing the other way, it represents death and the ground, but in Washington, DC, we are using it the other way, up, as a celebration—the provisional conclusion to a long history.”
Washington Skeleton™ Aluminum Side Chair, designed by David Adjaye.
The architect is not only adept at uncovering new meaning in familiar histories, but at testing abstract ideas in projects of vastly different functions and scales, including his work for Knoll. The bronze lattice façade encasing the NMAAHC is echoed in the skeletal structure of Adjaye’s Side Chairs for Knoll, while the building’s monumental massing implies a connection to the Corona Coffee Table not simply in name. But although the visual similarities between Adjaye’s designs are easy to glean, the architect suggests that they go deeper. To use his thoughts on the Washington Collection, the building, too, is “a play on the idea of permanence and history versus modernity.”
While there may not be explicit ties between building and furniture, Adjaye tends to harness the cathartic nature of the design process to think through certain crucial issues. His projects, whether made for a human to straddle or become lost within, are meditations on reconciliation—part of a continuing effort to concretize a confluence of cultural narratives.
“The silhouette represents the soul of the building. It is the basis on which you discover the project; it invites you to connect with this new experience.”
—David Adjaye
The Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, designed by David Adjaye. Photograph: Alan Karchmer/Smithsonian NMAAHC.
“The patterned screen is the device that reasserts the singular purpose of the building and mediates between its internal complexity and the urban condition,” he explained. “The silhouette represents the soul of the building. It is the basis on which you discover the project; it invites you to connect with this new experience.” The bronze lattice, which shimmers with different intensities depending on the time of day, was derived from the metalsmithing traditions of freed slaves in South Carolina and Georgia. It seems to protect the museum, in a manner reminiscent of the cantilevered structure of the Washington Skeleton Side Chairs: “it’s an exoskeleton, an armature that gives you comfort,” Adjaye said of the first chair in the collection. “It’s not a visual language, it’s really an attitude and approach to research, to materiality, to history.”
