Sir David Adjaye THE ARCHITECTURE AND THE ARCHITECT

 

Sir David Adjaye

THE ARCHITECTURE AND THE ARCHITECT

When the Work Survives the Man — The Profession's Unfinished Reckoning with Genius, Power, and the People Left Behind

By Arindam Bose  | Architect / Designer Spotlight | BeEstates Intelligence| Part 20 | AUGUST 2026

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Last week in this series found Ole Scheeren insisting that scale becomes legible only when it is given a story to perform — that the loop, the spiral, and the carved void are not gestures but the physical apparatus through which a building's interior life becomes visible to the city watching it from the street. Form follows fiction. Architecture as narrative construction.

This week the series arrives at a different and more difficult territory.

Not a building that performs to the city. A building that holds the city's grief. A building that stands on the National Mall in Washington D.C. and makes people weep before they walk through the door — because what it says about who built this country, and who was never credited for it, is said in the material of the building's own skin.

The architect who made that building is David Adjaye.

And this week the series does something it has not done before: it uses one architect's career not as a straightforward portrait but as the occasion to ask the question his career makes unavoidable.

What do we do when the work is genuine and the harm is also genuine, and neither one cancels the other out?

THE WORK: WHY IT MAKES THIS HARD

Let me state the architecture plainly first, because the difficulty of what follows is exactly proportional to the quality of what precedes it.

Born 22 September 1966 in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Raised across Tanzania, Egypt, Yemen, and Lebanon as his father's diplomatic postings moved the family through the Arab world and East Africa. Arrived in the United Kingdom as a teenager. Studied at London South Bank University for his undergraduate degree, then at the Royal College of Art where his teachers included Peter Cook, Nigel Coates, and David Chipperfield — three of the sharpest architectural intellects in British practice of that generation. Worked in Porto for Eduardo Souto de Moura, the Portuguese master whose buildings achieve their authority through an almost violent material honesty. Founded Adjaye Associates in London in 2000, subsequently opening offices in New York and Accra.

The practice that followed is, by any serious measure, one of the most culturally consequential architectural careers produced anywhere in the world in the first quarter of this century.

The Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington D.C. 

— opened September 2016, 420,000 square feet, $540 million, designed in collaboration with the Freelon Adjaye Bond / SmithGroup team — is the building this series would ordinarily spend the majority of its word count on. Not because it is formally novel in the way that CCTV is novel, or structurally courageous in the way that Sara Kulturhus is courageous. Because it does something that architecture almost never does at this scale: it changes what is possible for the people who stand in front of it.

The building's three-tiered corona — clad in cast aluminium panels whose geometric perforation pattern derives directly from the ironwork crafted by enslaved African American artisans in Charleston, South Carolina and New Orleans, Louisiana — is not a stylistic choice. It is an argument. The argument is that the people who built this country, who forged its gates and decorated its churches and shaped its material culture with their hands, deserve to have that craft tradition become the exterior skin of the institution that holds their national memory. The ornament is not decorative. It is reparative. It places the work of Black hands at the most publicly visible surface of a national museum on the National Mall, in the sight line of the Washington Monument, across the grass from the Lincoln Memorial.

In its first weeks of operation, the museum had reservation waitlists stretching eight weeks. People drove from Alabama and Mississippi and Louisiana to stand in front of it before they went inside. They stood on the pavement outside and wept. Not because of the architecture. Because of what the architecture said about them.

That is not a minor achievement. That is architecture operating at the precise frequency of social meaning that the discipline reaches perhaps once a generation and cannot manufacture on demand.

The Nobel Peace Centre in Oslo, 2005

 

— the old Vestbanen railway station reoccupied with radical interior decoration and interactive exhibition design, opened in the presence of Nelson Mandela and that year's laureate Wangari Maathai. 

The Idea Store Whitechapel, 2005

 

— a community library and learning centre in one of London's most ethnically diverse and economically pressured neighbourhoods, shortlisted for the RIBA Stirling Prize, its striped glass facade inspired by the market stalls on Whitechapel Road below. 

The Sugar Hill Mixed-Use Development in Harlem, 2015

 — affordable housing with a children's museum built into the base, graphite precast panels embossed with roses paying tribute to the neighbourhood's heritage designation, windows that frame Central Park and the Hudson River from apartments occupied by families who would never otherwise have that view.

Ruby City in San Antonio, 2019

 — an art museum whose exterior reads like a sheared red rock formation, rough and encrusted with two hues of recycled glass above the smooth polished surface at human-touch height, as if the earth itself had been cleanly cut at the precise line where a person's hand reaches. 

The Abrahamic Family House in Abu Dhabi, 2023

— a mosque, a synagogue, and a church sitting as three distinct cubes of different orientation on a shared secular plinth, their individual identities uncompromised, the common ground between them literally the place where everyone stands. 

The Princeton University Art Museum, 2025

 

— seven pavilions scaling a major institutional building to harmonise with the Gothic collegiate fabric around it, galleries arranged largely on a single level to challenge the hierarchical display logic of the multi-storey museum typology. 

The Studio Museum in Harlem, 2025

 

— a reverse stoop descending from the street down into the museum, inverting the institutional logic of the grand entrance stair that asks you to climb toward culture, bringing culture down instead to meet you at street level.

One hundred and twenty projects across four decades. Every continent. Every typology. A practice that moved, with unusual consistency, between the Global South's civilisational intelligence and the Global North's cultural institutions — and made those institutions more honest about what they owed by changing the material language through which they represent themselves.

OBE in 2007. Knighthood in 2017. RIBA Royal Gold Medal in 2021. Order of Merit in 2022. Time magazine's 100 Most Influential People in 2017. First Louis Kahn Visiting Professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Kenzo Tange Professor at Harvard Graduate School of Design. Teacher at Yale and Princeton. Mentor to Mariam Kamara and Kunlé Adeyemi — two of the most important architects now working in Africa.

That is the work.

Now the other thing.

THE HARM: WHY IT CANNOT BE FOOTNOTED

In July 2023, the Financial Times published an investigation based on the accounts of three women who had worked at Adjaye Associates. The women alleged sexual assault and harassment. Their accounts were specific. Several spoke on the record.

Adjaye denied the allegations. No criminal charges were brought.

He then issued a public apology in which he acknowledged what he called mistakes and described having blurred the boundaries between his professional and personal lives. The women who had made the allegations did not use the language of blurred boundaries to describe what had happened to them.

The institutional consequences were swift and substantial. He resigned as architectural adviser to the Mayor of London. He removed himself from personal involvement in the UK Holocaust Memorial in London, though Adjaye Associates continued as lead architect on the project. The Africa Institute in Sharjah cancelled a major new campus commission. His practice was dropped from a £57 million project at Liverpool's International Slavery Museum. Adjaye Associates began a redundancy programme as projects and revenue contracted.

Former employees came forward separately to describe what they called a toxic workplace culture inside the practice — not all of it connected directly to the original allegations, but consistent with an environment where power concentrated at the top was not subject to the structural accountability mechanisms that might have caught and stopped the conduct that the women described years earlier.

Adjaye Associates commissioned an independent workplace review from a King's Counsel. The firm publicly stated that significant governance changes had been made and that the practice's stated intention was to become an exceptional workplace.

The profession absorbed all of this. Architecture publications covered it. Architecture social media processed it. Architecture schools discussed it briefly. And then the world moved on at the pace the world moves on, which is to say: considerably faster than the women who reported the harm had any reason to expect.

The question of what to do with the work remained unresolved. It remains unresolved now, in August 2026. This article does not resolve it. But it refuses to pretend the question does not exist.

THE PROBLEM THE PROFESSION KEEPS FRAMING INCORRECTLY

Every creative field has a version of this problem and every creative field handles it badly for the same underlying reason: the question gets framed incorrectly from the beginning.

The incorrect frame is: can we separate the art from the artist?

This frame is a philosophical escape hatch. It permits the person asking to hold the architecture in one hand and the conduct in the other and treat them as parallel objects that can be independently evaluated — as if the architect's power over the people inside his practice had no relationship to the architecture those people helped to produce, and as if the buildings' public meaning had no relationship to the institutional culture that generated them.

The frame fails for a simple reason: you cannot separate the art from the artist because the artist is not the only person in the building. A practice of Adjaye Associates' scale is a community of hundreds of architects, project managers, designers, and specialists whose labour, ideas, and creative energy flow into work that carries one name at the top. The junior architect who spent three years detailing the NMAAHC's aluminium corona panels. The project manager who coordinated seven years of construction logistics on the National Mall. The women who came to work every day inside an environment that the independent review later confirmed was not adequately safe.

Their contribution to the work is real. Their experience of the workplace was also real. These are not two separate stories. They are the same story told from different positions in the same institutional hierarchy.

The correct frame — the one the profession needs and keeps flinching from — is not: can we separate the art from the artist? It is: what does the art cost, and who pays?

When a building of the NMAAHC's quality and cultural importance is produced inside an institution whose culture permitted the conduct described by three women, the question is not whether the building matters. It clearly does. The question is whether the concentration of creative authority that made the building possible — the hierarchical deference to the principal's vision, the institutional culture in which the named architect's judgment is final and his approval is required for career advancement — also made the women's experience structurally difficult to challenge, report, or escape without professional consequence.

If the answer to that question is yes — and the evidence available suggests it is — then the profession has a structural problem, not merely a personal one. The personal problem is Adjaye's to own. He has partially owned it, in the language of blurred boundaries, which is not the ownership the situation required.

The structural problem belongs to every institution that concentrates creative authority in a single named architect without building the accountability structures that would allow the people beneath that architect to report conduct safely, escalate concerns without career risk, or access justice without going to a newspaper.

THE THREE POSITIONS THAT RESOLVE NOTHING

When an architect of Adjaye's standing becomes the subject of allegations like these, the profession tends to cycle through three positions in sequence. None of them resolves anything.

The first position is protective deflection. The work is too important. The NMAAHC is a national monument. The career represents too much — too much proof that an architect from a Tanzanian-British background who grew up across the Global South could reach the absolute summit of the discipline — to be damaged by allegations that were denied and not criminally charged. This position is held with particular intensity by people who see in Adjaye's career the representation that a historically exclusionary profession desperately needed.

It fails because it asks the women who came forward to absorb the cost of preserving a cultural legacy they also contributed to, in a workplace that failed them. The NMAAHC's importance does not retroactively make the workplace safe. The architectural press's investment in the narrative of Adjaye as proof of the profession's diversity does not oblige the women who were harmed to remain silent to protect that narrative.

The second position is cancellation without nuance. The allegations are serious, the conduct was wrong, the apology was inadequate, and therefore the work should be viewed entirely through the lens of the conduct — the buildings redescribed as products of an abusive institution, the legacy permanently contaminated, the name removed from serious discourse.

It fails because it erases the genuine contribution — both Adjaye's and that of the hundreds of collaborators who worked on these projects across four decades — and provides no model for how the profession should engage with buildings that are already built, already standing, already inhabited by communities whose relationship to those buildings is not contingent on what happened inside the practice that designed them.

The people who stand on the National Mall and weep did not form their relationship to the NMAAHC conditionally. The building holds their national memory whether or not the architect behaved correctly. The community's claim on that building belongs to the community. It is not subject to the architect's conduct.

The third position is studied ambiguity. Acknowledge the complexity. Hold both truths. Note that the profession is reflecting. Move on without concluding anything.

This is the most common position and the most comfortable and the least honest. Studied ambiguity is not a position. It is the absence of a position dressed in the language of nuance.

WHAT THE PROFESSION ACTUALLY NEEDS TO DECIDE

The question is not aesthetic or archival. It is institutional and structural.

Architectural firms of Adjaye Associates' type are unusual institutions in a specific way: they are organised around the creative authority of a principal whose name is the brand, whose vision is the practice's primary product, and whose relationships with clients, cultural institutions, and municipalities depend on the singularity of that named identity. The practice is not a collective. It is not a flat partnership. It is, in the overwhelming majority of cases that produce architecture of this quality, a hierarchy in which the principal's judgment is final, the principal's approval shapes career outcomes, and the principal's conduct toward the people below is subject to whatever informal norms the principal themselves maintains.

This structure produces exceptional architecture. It has, throughout the history of the discipline, produced most of the buildings that appear in this series.

It also produces the precise conditions under which the conduct described by the three women becomes structurally possible — because the person whose conduct is in question is simultaneously the person whose approval determines career advancement, whose displeasure carries professional consequences, and to whom the institutional culture has ceded moral authority alongside creative authority.

The architecture that came out of this structure is real and it matters. The harm that came out of this structure is also real and it also matters. The profession's obligation is not to resolve the tension between those two facts by choosing which one to privilege. Its obligation is to change the structure so that future practices do not reproduce the conditions.

Every major architectural practice organised around a named principal — and most of the practices whose work appears in this series are — has a version of this structural vulnerability. The concentration of creative authority that makes the work possible also concentrates moral authority in the same person, and moral authority concentrated without accountability mechanisms is the condition under which harm becomes institutionally invisible until it surfaces outside the institution, in a newspaper, years after the fact.

The Adjaye Associates workplace review was commissioned after the Financial Times investigation. The investigation was possible because journalism created an external mechanism for the women to be heard. If the journalism had not happened, the review would not have happened. The profession is aware of this chain of events. The profession has not, in the three years since, substantially reformed the structural conditions that made that chain necessary.

THE BUILDINGS THAT NOW CARRY TWO HISTORIES

The NMAAHC is on the National Mall. It will be there for two hundred years. The African American community's relationship to it is not contingent on the 2023 Financial Times investigation. The building holds the history of people whose history this country spent two centuries refusing to hold publicly, and that function does not pause while the architectural profession debates what to do about the architect.

But the building now carries two histories simultaneously. The history it was designed to hold — the bronze corona derived from enslaved artisans' ironwork, the underground galleries descending through chronological strata, the exhibition spaces that host a nation's most difficult memory — and the history of how it was produced, which includes the accounts of the women who worked in the practice that designed it.

The profession's temptation is to treat these as sequential: first the building, then the conduct, and since the building came first it stands independent of what followed. But the conduct did not follow the building. The conduct overlapped with it. The workplace culture that the independent review later confirmed was inadequate was the workplace culture inside which the building was being designed and delivered. These are not two separate chapters with a clean chronological boundary.

The way to honour both histories — the building's and the women's — is not to cancel one or ignore the other. It is to refuse the convenience of treating them as separable, to insist that what the building achieved and what the workplace failed to provide are both true simultaneously, and to use that insistence as the energy for structural reform rather than for individual moral judgment delivered at a comfortable distance.

The building is not responsible for the architect's conduct. The architect's conduct is not erased by the building's cultural importance. The women who were harmed are not required to absorb the cost of either the architecture's legacy or the profession's discomfort.

All three of those statements are true at the same time. The profession needs to operate as if all three are true at the same time.

THE INDIA MIRROR: THE STARCHITECT ECONOMY AND ITS SILENCE

India's architectural practice has its own version of this structural problem, and it is in some ways more acute than the equivalent in Europe or North America precisely because the institutional mechanisms for addressing it are less developed.

The concentration of commissions in named practices, the cultural deference to the principal architect as singular creative authority, the absence of formalised internal reporting mechanisms in most private architectural firms, and the professional consequences — in a market where commissions are relationship-dependent and reputation is the primary currency — that attach to a junior architect who challenges a senior principal's conduct: these are the structural conditions that make the harm described in the Adjaye case possible in practices of every scale and every geography.

India's architectural institutions — the Council of Architecture, the Indian Institute of Architects — have codes of professional conduct. They do not have the protected reporting channels, the independent governance structures, or the enforceable workplace standards that would allow a junior architect at a major practice to report misconduct without placing their career in the hands of the institution and the person they are reporting about.

The #MeToo moment that restructured parts of Indian film, journalism, and corporate culture in 2017 and 2018 touched architecture lightly and moved past it without substantial institutional reform. The structural conditions that made the harm possible were not addressed. The starchitect economy — in which commissions flow to named individuals whose reputations are the practice's primary differentiator — continues to concentrate authority in ways the profession has not built accountability systems to match.

The Adjaye situation is not an occasion for India's architectural profession to feel relieved that it is someone else's problem in someone else's country. It is an occasion to ask whether the structural conditions that produced it exist here. The honest answer, looking at the concentration of authority in most major Indian practices and the absence of protected reporting mechanisms, is that they do.

The best architecture India produces in the next fifty years will come from practices where the principal's creative authority is matched by institutional accountability structures that make a junior architect's safety as legible and protected as the principal's vision. Those practices do not yet predominantly exist. Building them is the structural reform the profession needs — in India and everywhere else.

THE PRINCIPLE THIS WEEK ARTICULATES

This series has now produced portraits of architects whose defining principles range across the full spectrum of what architecture can be asked to do. Erskine gave us the building as a promise kept to the person inside it. Fehn gave us architecture as conversation with the landscape. Scarpa gave us the grammar of time. Scheeren gave us narrative construction — form follows fiction. Koolhaas gave us the city as a text to be read before it is a problem to be solved.

The principle that emerges from this week's differently structured piece is the hardest one the series has articulated and the most necessary one:

The institution that produces a building owes the people inside it the same dignity that the building claims to offer the world.

The NMAAHC claims to hold with dignity the memory of people who were not treated with dignity. That claim is the building's moral authority. It is what makes people weep on the National Mall before they have walked through the door.

The practice that produced the NMAAHC did not, on the evidence available, provide that dignity to everyone inside it.

That gap — between the claim the building makes to the world and the conditions inside the institution that made it — is not a contradiction that cancels the architecture. It is a contradiction the profession must close. Not for the sake of any building's reputation. For the sake of the people working right now, in practices that have not reformed the structural conditions, whose safety matters whether or not the project they are working on is important enough to make the news.

The buildings survive.

The people deserve to.

That is what this week is about.

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Last week Ole Scheeren gave this series its most direct argument about what large-scale architecture owes the people who watch it from the street: it must perform, it must tell a story visible from outside, it must make its interior life legible to the city.

This week the series asks the prior question. Before the building performs to the city, the institution that makes the building must be honest with the people inside it. Before the architecture can claim to offer dignity to the community it serves, the practice must provide dignity to the architects it employs.

The NMAAHC tells the story of people who built a country without credit.

The women who came forward in 2023 were telling a smaller story. About a workplace. About what happened to them inside it. About asking to be heard.

The profession that wants to go on producing buildings that make people weep on the National Mall owes it to those women — and to the people working in practices right now — to build institutions as honest as the buildings claim to be.

It has not yet done that.

-Arindam Bose 

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Previous in the Architect / Designer Spotlight Series:

✅ Ole Scheeren — The Architect Who Made the Building Tell a Story

✅ Rem Koolhaas — The Architect Who Made the City the Brief

✅ Shaun Killa — The Architect Who Built the Future Before Asking What It Should Look Like

✅ Ralph Erskine — The Architect Who Built Dignity Into the Frost

✅ Sverre Fehn — The Architect Who Listened to the Mountain

✅ Carlo Scarpa — The Architect Who Made the Joint a Masterpiece

✅ Raj Rewal and Bernardo Fort-Brescia — Two Cities, Two Masters

✅ David Chipperfield — The Architect Who Made Permanence a Radical Act

✅ John Portman — The Architect Who Built a City From the Inside Out

✅ Smiljan Radić Clarke — The Architect Who Built From the Edge of the World

✅ Kazuyo Sejima — The Architect Who Made Walls Optional

✅ Renzo Piano — The Architect Who Taught Buildings to Breathe Light

✅ Thomas Heatherwick — The Architect Who Tried to Make Buildings Feel Again

✅ Tatiana Bilbao — The Architect Who Made Geometry a Conversation

✅ Jeanne Gang — The Architect Who Made Buildings Breathe

✅ Alejandro Aravena — The Architect Who Built Half and Changed Everything

✅ Francis Kéré — The Architect Who Built Dignity Before Buildings

✅ Kengo Kuma — The Architect of Disappearance

✅ Shigeru Ban — The Architect Who Tore Helplessness Into Building

✅ Liu Jiakun — The Pritzker Prize Winner Who Turned Architecture Into Humanity

✅ Bjarke Ingels — The Impossible Made Inevitable

By Arindam Bose  | Architect / Designer Spotlight | BeEstates Intelligence| Part 20 | AUGUST 2026