For Hadara Magazine, YAA Projects founder Nana Biamah-Ofosu speaks with architect Sir David Adjaye about architecture’s relationship to culture, power and planetary thinking. The conversation reflects on Adjaye’s early experiences across Africa, the Middle East and Europe, and how these geographies shaped his understanding of architecture as a tool for social agency rather than merely a tool for purely formal expression.
Discussing projects across Africa such as the Thabo Mbeki Presidential Library in Johannesburg, the Museum of West African Art (MOWAA) in Benin City, Nigeria, and the Martyrs Memorial in Niamey, Niger, as well in the Middle East, Adjaye describes a situated approach to practice rooted in local knowledge and cultural specificity. The discussion centres on the role of architecture in building new institutional infrastructures, while foregrounding African spatial traditions such as compounds and communal thresholds as relevant models for the environmental and cultural challenges of the twenty-first century.
Read David Adjaye: Building a Vision of Africa and the Planet here.