A good man in Africa

Nowhere in our shrinking world has retained its sense of mystery like Africa, and for once it is one of its own sons that is famously exploring its potential. David Adjaye, already an international best-seller, sees it brimming with unexpected opportunities

Words Hugh Pearman | Portrait Marco Micceri

David Adjaye probably knows more about the built environment of Africa than anyone else on earth. Born in Tanzania, raised in Ghana, the son of an official posted to a succession of African and Middle Eastern cities, he resumed his wanderings across the continent after making his name in the UK and internationally. One result of his odyssey is the multi-volume, multi-contributor book Adjaye Africa Architecture, published last year complete with thousands of his own photographs. His plan, he writes, ‘was to complete the journey I had started in my early life’.  For him, Africa had always been a point of reference and he needed to update himself: the speed of urbanisation is intense.

His decade-long journeyings had to fit around a burgeoning international professional career. Although like many others this was knocked back hard during the credit-crunch-induced recession, he is at present designing and building in America (the National Museum of African American History and Culture on Washington’s National Mall), the UK (Mass Extinction Memorial Observatory or MEMO, Portland), and in Lisbon, Doha, Germany and Accra in Ghana – where among much else he is developing a new college and a tropical housing ‘superblock’ with huge cantilevered planted balconies. Now based in a large studio on the ground floor of one of his own office block refurbishments in London’s Marylebone, with a satellite office in Berlin (‘to handle the European work’), Adjaye Associates is looking increasingly to Africa.

He’s keen to correct the Western misconceptions about the continent – for instance that its people are ruralists with little sense of the urban, something which he points out is belied by the great cities of the ancient African empires as much as by today’s sprawling metropolises. Or the notion of Egypt as being somehow exotically apart from the rest of Africa (‘Cleopatra and Hollywood spoiled it all’), when the Nubians of Egypt came via the Nile from the south: the proto-pyramids of Meroe are way south in today’s Sudan, for instance. When we get on to Casbah architecture it is typical of Adjaye to point out that the Casbah cities, often regarded as Arab in origin, were built by the very different Berbers. It is equally characteristic for him to remark, almost in passing:  ‘Angola now OWNS Lisbon – because of Angola’s wealth, and Lisbon’s decline.’

What? Angola? The country that for so long was a byword for chaos, a proxy player in the Cold War that moved on to a murderous civil war? The same. It’s a kind of reverse colonialism, an empire striking back. Adjaye continues: ‘Angola used to be a war zone, a hellhole. Now it is one of the most extraordinary countries in Africa. Growth is unprecedented. It doesn’t have the population density of Nigeria or South Africa, but it will basically be one of the big four – Angola, South Africa, Nigeria and Egypt. Angola has diamonds, gold, oil – there’s nothing they don’t have in that country.’

There are, of course, issues – big ones. Some African nations are more democratic than others, and Angola, with its war-torn past, is nothing if not authoritarian today. Nigeria has its well-documented political problems. South Africa may be stable but Egypt – along with the other North African countries of the ‘Arab Spring’ – has a big question-mark hanging over it as the old military face up to the new democrats. The continent is one vast overlay of shifting influences that are variously climatic, tribal, ethnic, religious, political, and colonial. The old colonialists may have withdrawn since the first inklings of independence over 50 years ago, but now you find new economic masters firmly established to exploit resources, like the Chinese, who extract oil and minerals all over Africa. Again, Adjaye is refreshingly direct.

‘The Chinese thing is a curse and a blessing. The curse is that they’re not sending their best people over.  The skills need to be transferred. The biggest missing thing on the continent is vocational courses: training this very able group – the new middle classes – to have skills and not just leaving them as labourers. This is the big discourse that has to happen.  Primary and secondary education is fine. It’s the colleges and the guilds have to be built in Africa. It’s the idea of the love of a profession – not lawyers or accountants, we have too many of those –  but practical skills.’

In case you were thinking of architecture and engineering, that’s only a small part of it. ‘It’s up for grabs. Farming should be one of the great professions in Africa. It will be like what happened in the MidWest in America. If you want to start a profession, buy land and farm it.’

The projection is that Africa will hold a population of 2.5 billion by 2050. That looks like a big problem, given the much-publicised difficulties of feeding the present populations of famine-struck, war-ravaged nations in the Horn of Africa, but Adjaye sees a solution.

‘Nigeria has around 160 million people. That’s really the powerhouse country. It has a self-sustaining economy, huge oil reserves and huge agricultural potential. Nigeria can feed the entire continent. Being right in the forest belt it has enough fertile land. Once the governance issues are dealt with – Lagos I think is a real model, unrecognisable from what it was 10 years ago –  it’s about them managing their resources and growing their country. Lagos is a little bit like Rio – a series of islands in this beautiful bay. ‘
Economically, the numbers bear him out. Goldman Sachs has put Nigeria and Egypt into its list of ‘Next 11 countries’ to become real economic forces after the BRICS grouping – Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. But Adjaye, who is edging ever closer to opening an office in West Africa, probably in the famously stable and fast-growing haven of Ghana, thinks that Africa is the Next Big Thing for another reason – its time-zone affinity with Europe.

‘Europe and Africa are synonymous in time. The time it takes to travel by train to Edinburgh is the same as the time it takes to fly to the middle of Africa. It takes six hours to get to Accra. There’s no jetlag, because of the time zones. And, apart from a few tribal areas, there’s really just three key languages you have to either know or work in – Portuguese, French, English. With those you can go almost anywhere. Most Europeans I know are in that realm. We can do that. It’s a direct connection.’

All these are good reasons for architects to actively consider Africa over more conventional areas of work, but for Adjaye in particular there is a powerful cultural connection. Instead of imposing Western-style solutions (he points out that Jean Prouve’s celebrated prefabricated 1950s ‘Maisons Tropicales’ were all but destroyed by the climate of the Congo) for him the process works better the other way round: we should learn from Africa. In particular, for him this means thinking much less of the building as isolated object and much more as part of an urban network.

‘Where there’s been a complete tabula rasa, like Windhoek in Namibia, it’s like a classical European city. But other cities, even Gaborone in Botswana, are much more like an African landscape – interconnected flatland. There is the power node, but also the idea of the integrated mat. You make a city through horizontal connections. I find this fascinating as a way of thinking. It’s the interlocking space. I realised that’s what I was doing in my own work – but wasn’t quite sure of – was this melding, this 1 to 1 scaling of space. And it’s about stopping the objectifying of buildings. Even in Moscow (his Moscow School of Management), which in the end is picturesque because you have 30 acres, it is basically an infrastructure of inside and outside spaces, blurring scales. I think my work is principally about this. Something that envelopes you. The intimacy of the African city, the network, the unit. But while I see this influence in my own work, it’s hybrid – it’s also reading it through the English landscape and London in particular. I’ve been trained by both the modernity of London and the instincts of my roots.’

If anyone embodies the ideal of the internationalist architect, seemingly at home in any country, it is surely Adjaye, who works from Denver to Oslo, Whitechapel to Washington.  In fact when he first mentioned the MEMO building in Portland, I assumed he was talking about Portland, Oregon, not Portland, Dorset, where the stone comes from.  On Africa, he is especially convincing. He’s done his homework with remarkable dedication over many years. He namechecks other European architects finding work there. He knows his stuff. If Adjaye says we should look again to Africa, we’d be wise to listen.