David Adjaye: Form, Heft, Material

About

The exhibition, organized in collaboration with Haus der Kunst in Munich and the Art Institute of Chicago, offers insight into the global architect’s unique approach, highlighting the ways he weaves local geographies and cultural legacies into his celebrated designs.  Showcasing over twenty examples of his built works, including the Moscow School of Management (Skolkovo), the exhibition also provides rare access to Adjaye’s research strategies in the early stage of design development.

David Adjaye: Form, Heft, Material is the first exhibition of a major architect at Garage and inaugurates a new chapter in the Institution’s longstanding interest in developing discourse around contemporary architecture and its role in society today. Adjaye’s firm Adjaye Associates has developed an exhibition design specifically for the Museum, bringing his characteristic sense of light and pacing to Garage’s historical modernist building.

The retrospective is organized into four sections, each devoted to a particular aspect of Adjaye’s practice. Living Spaces collects Adjaye’s projects for private homes, a practice which first brought him international acclaim. Democracy of Knowledge concentrates on Adjaye’s public projects, presenting furniture and external finishes of buildings—all of which, either by appearance or purpose, are connected to various forms of civic education and community building. The section also houses scale models of several projects, including the famous design for the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington D.C. This section also includes substantial content on Adjaye’s latest ongoing works, including the Latvia Museum of Contemporary Art.

African Research will be devoted to Adjaye’s unprecedented research into the architecture of fifty-three capital cities across the African continent.

Continuing the emphasis on research, a new initiative, developed in collaboration with MARCH Architecture School in Moscow, is centered on the fourteen capitals of the former Soviet Republics and twelve key Russian industrial cities. Drawing on Adjaye’s ambitious research project Europolis (completed in 2008) for which the studio accumulated a colossal database of the European capitals (population density, total area of the capitals, main roads, underground systems, waterways, internet usage data, GDP, CO2 emissions, employment levels, languages and so on) this new version, Asiapolis will present an analysis of the urban landscapes after the collapse of the Soviet Union, accumulating and visually representing new information on the cities much needed in order to make sense of the changing built environment in Russia and former Soviet Republics.

David Adjaye: Form, Heft, Material was initiated by Haus der Kunst and the Art Institute of Chicago and curated by Okwui Enwezor and Zoë Ryan. The exhibition in Moscow is organized by Kate Fowle, Garage Chief Curator, in collaboration with Andrey Misiano, Assistant Curator.

Sir David Adjaye

Sir David Adjaye OBE was born in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, in 1966 to Ghanian parents and is currently based in London. He was raised across Africa, the Middle East, and the United Kingdom. Having graduated from the Royal College of Art with a Master’s degree in Architecture in 1993, he went on to establish his own studio, Adjaye Associates, in 2000, which now has offices in London, New York, and Accra. Adjaye was knighted in 2016.

Adjaye Associates has completed over fifty projects across Europe, the United States, Africa, Asia and the Middle East. Two of his largest commissions to date are the design of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture on the National Mall in Washington D.C. (2016) and the Moscow School of Management (SKOLKOVO) (2010). He is currently working on the expansion of the new Studio Museum in Harlem (ongoing) and the design for the Latvian Museum of Contemporary Art (ongoing).