David Adjaye lecture

Adjaye Associates, in its own words, seeks to create “buildings [that] belong to yet diverge from their contexts, absorbing and animating difference rather than homogenizing it.” Sensitivity to materials, color, shape, and light informs the work on all scales. In this excerpt from his November 21, 2013, Current Work lecture, David Adjaye presents four completed and current projects at a range of scales and uses: a new building for the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, affordable and resilient Asem-Pa houses developed for the Lower Ninth Ward in post-Katrina New Orleans, a live/work adaptive re-use project in London’s East End, and the plans for The National Museum of African American History and Culture on the National Mall. These projects represent a series of platforms for Adjaye Associates that have in part allowed the firm to research shifting and hybridizing topologies, new dimensions of buildings, and the possibilities in small scale interventions.