Tropicana Magazine Nov-Dec 2018 #121: Festive Frivolities

THE HOME
DAVID
ADJAYE
Architect David Adjaye on how great
design will transform West Africa’s
future.
TEXT BY CAROLINE ROUX / THE TELEGRAPH /
THE INTERVIEW PEOPLE
D
avid Adjaye’s star doesn’t stop rising.
The Ghanian-British architect had only
just completed the National Museum of
African American History and Culture on
Washington’s National Mall in 2016, when he
received a knighthood in 2017, and popped
up on Time magazine’s most influential 100
the same year.
Now Sir David, at 51 years old his
current projects include the New Studio
Museum in Harlem, the Latvian Museum of
Contemporary Art in Riga, the Holocaust
memorial in London (with Ron Arad) and
a glitzy 61-storey Wall Street tower in
Manhattan.
It’s Adjaye - with his old friend Lord
(Richard) Rogers; the Serpentine Galleries
artistic director, Hans Ulrich Obrist; and
its chief executive, Yana Peel - who now
decides which architect is invited to build
the Serpentine Pavilion; and his practice is
one of six charged with the restructuring of
London’s Lancaster West estate, where the
Grenfell Tower tragedy occurred. And then
there’s Accra, Ghana, where his 15-strong
office is out to reconsider the warp and weft
of contemporary architecture on the African
continent.
So it’s hardly surprising that when the
young West African architect Mariam
Kamara received a call from Rolex, the Swiss
watch company, telling her that she had
been chosen by Adjaye as his protégée in its
prestigious mentorship scheme, she had a bit
of a wobble.
TM | NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2018
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