The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) has just announced that Sir David Adjaye will receive the 2021 Royal Gold Medal. One of the world’s highest honors for architecture, the Royal Gold Medal is given as a recognition of a lifetime’s work, “to a person or group of people who have had a significant influence either directly or indirectly on the advancement of architecture“.

Sir David Adjaye, over the course of 25 years, has achieved international recognition and attention with a series of groundbreaking and worldwide interventions, ranging from private houses, exhibitions, and furniture design, to major cultural buildings and city masterplans. In 2000 he founded his practice Adjaye Associates with studios in Accra, London, and New York. Combining practice with teaching, Adjaye taught at the universities of Harvard, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Princeton.

It’s incredibly humbling and a great honor to have my peers recognize the work I have developed with my team and its contribution to the field over the past 25 years. Architecture, for me, has always been about the creation of beauty to edify all peoples around the world equally and to contribute to the evolution of the craft. The social impact of this discipline has been and will continue to be the guiding force in the experimentation that informs my practice. A heartfelt and sincere moment of gratitude and thanks to all the people who supported the journey to get to this moment.

— Sir David Adjaye 

Known for the highly celebrated Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, in Washington, DC (2016), Adjaye Associates has completed projects across the world. Their interventions include Ruby City, an art center in San Antonio, Texas (2019); the Alara Concept Store in Lagos (2016); the Sugar Hill Mixed-Use Development (housing, museum, community facilities, and offices) in Harlem, New York (2015); the Aishti Foundation, a mixed-use retail and arts Centre in Beirut, Lebanon (2015); two neighborhood libraries in Washington, DC (both 2012); the Moscow School of Management Skolkovo in Russia (2010); the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver, Colorado (2007); the Nobel Peace Centre in Oslo, Norway (2005); Rivington Place arts center in Hackney, London (2007); and the Idea Stores – two community libraries in London (2004, 2005).

Through his work as an architect, Sir David Adjaye speaks confidently across cultures, disciplines, politics, and continents. His body of work is global and local, finely attuned as it reflects and responds to context and community, climate, and culture.

The lessons Adjaye learned through his initial series of conceptual and sensuous dwellings set boldly against and within the shifting landscape of central London have been disassembled and reconfigured as he has realized wider, civic public and social spaces of cities across the world. Listening to clients and users and often working with artists, Adjaye’s work is contradictory and yet coherent, contrasting and courageous, setting up and balancing elegance and grit, weightlessness and weight, dark and light.

Adjaye has combined practice and teaching in schools of architecture around the world and championed civic representation through public discourse. He is dedicated to communicating and creating architecture that is both personal and inspired by the culture and the stories of people’s lives, realizing places that offer new layers of empathy, experience, and engagement.

His work reveals a core belief in the generative power of architecture. In a world that has become polarised, he brings politics, art, and science together with architecture, as he works to create a better future. The Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington DC united his many architectural and cultural agendas and expressed the role architecture can play in pluralism.

Adjaye is a singular and timely talent and a strong reminder of the insightful and integrative role of the architect. 

Like Our Story ? Donate to Support Us, Click Here

You want to share a story with us? Do you want to advertise with us? Do you need publicity/live coverage for product, service, or event? Contact us on WhatsApp +16477721660 or email Adebaconnector@gmail.com