SpeakerDavid Adjaye OBE is principal architect of Adjaye Associates. Established in 2000, this global practice has won a number of prestigious commissions, the biggest and most recent being the £160-million Moscow School of Management SKOLKOVO. Adjaye’s projects currently include the $500-million commission to redesign the Smithsonian National Museum of African American Culture and History (NMAACH). Adjaye also collaborates with important contemporary artists and curators to create unique spaces for art, including, most recently, exhibition design in 2010 for the all-video SITE Santa Fe Eighth International Biennial Exhibition the dissolve.
Adjaye currently holds a visiting professor post at Princeton University School of Architecture. He is a RIBA Chartered Member, an AIA Honorary Fellow, a Senior Fellow of the Design Futures Council and a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
He was awarded the OBE for services to architecture in 2007. Since 2005 he has published numerous books on architecture and has also exhibited widely. Over the course of 10 years, Adjaye has travelled and photographed each African capital city, which culminated in Urban Africa: David Adjaye’s Photographic Survey, a unique geo-cultural catalogue profiling the African city in a global context. Presented in exhibition by the Design Museum in 2010 the exhibition toured globally in 2011.
Adjaye has co-presented and hosted a number of television series and radio programmes for the BBC. A documentary of his career so far is currently being planned.
Adjaye was on the advisory panel for the Africa is Now exhibition at Design Indaba Expo 2014.