Space Case

By Richard Lacayo

Brown's Focus, a high-luster boutique in London's Mayfair district, is not what you would call a sizable space. There may be price tags in this shop bigger than the sales floor. But one reason David Adjaye is the hot British architect of the moment is that he knows you don't need much room for an exclamation point. So into this narrow shop he has insinuated a staircase of varnished particle board that runs from the lower level to the center of the main floor. Jazzy, glamorous and slightly disreputable, this is a staircase that's a force to be reckoned with, like Anita Ekberg stepping out of the Trevi Fountain in La Dolce Vita.

To put it mildly, particle board makes for an unlikely luxury material, but give it enough shine, and--who knew?--it's more vivacious than an ocelot throw rug. Then again, coming at you with the unexpected is at the heart of what Adjaye does. "What I'm trying to say," he explains, "is that this might be the cheapest bloody material you can imagine, and it's beautiful." For the record, these days he's building himself a second home in Ghana made partly of mud.

A willingness to think seriously about the architectural possibilities of mud, a traditional African building material, is another reason Adjaye is the young wonder of the London design world. (Keep in mind that architecture may be the only job description other than eminence grise in which at 40 you still rank as a kid.) At age 36 he has on his resume a number of much discussed projects for some of London's better-known names in the world of art and design, including a house for the fashion photographer Juergen Teller and an addition for the actor Ewan McGregor.

Do a quick tour around London, and you can lean across his brutalist concrete-slab tables at the DJ bar Social or wander through the jewelry boutiques he recently masterminded for Selfridge's, the once sedentary London department store that has put itself back on the merchandising map with the hip redesign of its sales floors. A few years ago, the store's managers went to him looking for someone to cast a fresh eye on their massive neoclassical flagship store. (Picture the U.S. Treasury Building stuffed with designer boutiques.) Adjaye recalls their meeting with that impish smile of his. "I said to them, 'What you have here is a shantytown. I'm going to build you a city.'"

To build a city is, of course, what every architect dreams of. Adjaye is getting there, one building at a time. Earlier this year the borough of Tower Hamlet in London's rough-edged East End broke ground on his largest project to date, a library so up to the minute--with its cafes and retail space, escalator atrium and digital displays across the exterior walls--that the lackluster term library has been put aside. The official name for this place is the Idea Store. Directed to create a library that would be as user friendly as a shopping mall, Adjaye provided a design of interflowing spaces that he thinks of as "almost like a jungle gym that you climb all over."

The idea store would be a good way to describe the offices of Adjaye/Associates in decidedly unglamorous East London, near the defunct Gainsborough studios where Alfred Hitchcock made his early pre-Hollywood films. After a six-year partnership with the architect William Russell dissolved, Adjaye formed his own practice in 2000. He now has a staff of more than two dozen working on projects not only in Britain but in the U.S. as well. Last year the Rev. Eugene Rivers, a Boston-based activist clergyman, commissioned Adjaye to design an arts-and-media charter school in Dorchester, Mass.

Adjaye may be a singular man, but there's no one way to understand him. He's part go-your-own-way artist, part passionate communitarian, part canny salesman, part lyrical architectural philosopher. (One typical pronouncement: "I think design is a defunct word. I curate spaces.") The son of a Ghanaian diplomat, he was born in Tanzania and raised in Egypt, Yemen and Lebanon. He brings to his work the eye of a man who has learned as much from the intricately woven streetscapes of Cairo as from the ideal geometries of Le Corbusier. "I spent my childhood in a profoundly different physical environment, with a different sense of public and private spaces," he says. "That's where I started drawing."

In 1979 his family moved to London, where Adjaye eventually earned an architecture degree at South Bank University, and then made a fateful move to study further at the Royal College of Art. He says he went there to foster within himself "an artist's sensibility toward architecture. I wanted to see what architecture can be when art comes first." But the place also introduced him to a circle of friends who would go on to become the loosely affiliated group that the British call the YBAs--Young British Artists. Cultural bomb throwers, most of them collected and promoted by the wealthy ad executive Charles Saatchi, they tumbled loudly into America four years ago in the "Sensation" show at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York City.

Adjaye's most radical design statements have been made in his houses, a tricky place to play the provocateur, since for most clients home design is the architectural equivalent of comfort food. But he was fortunate in getting his early commissions from those art-school friends, people with spiky tastes and no stomach whatsoever for gingerbread. In the '90s, as they started to find success and money, they turned to Adjaye to give them houses as edgy as they were.

The first of those was a 1999 studio and home for the painter Chris Ofili, creator of the notorious Virgin Mary with elephant dung that enraged New York City's mayor Rudy Giuliani when it turned up in "Sensation." But the place that put Adjaye on the map was the so-called Elektra house, built for a pair of conceptual artists in the Whitechapel neighborhood that Jack the Ripper once prowled. It's plain at first sight that this is no cozy cottage. It's more like an urban battlement, a place that turns its face from what is mostly an unsightly street. It has no windows on the street side, where it presents instead a solid wall of resin-treated wood that has weathered over time to resemble rusted steel plate.

Adjaye is unapologetic about putting a windowless wall along a street where there is nothing to look at. Within the Elektra house, plentiful light is provided from skylights and a double-story window wall on the garden side of the house. "There is no need for a window along the street," he says, "except to appease an idea of historicism."

And appeasement, of course, is not what he does. You can tell that again from the Dirty house, a converted furniture factory that he turned into a residence and studio for Tim Noble and Sue Webster, artists whose most notorious early work was called Dirty White Trash (with Gulls), an installation that consisted of six months' worth of their household garbage. A newly built glass-walled upper story holds the couple's living space. The high-ceilinged lower floor contains their office and two studios.

Adjaye covered the building in a deep brown paint with a stucco-like surface so tough that the British use it to defend utility boxes from graffiti. It turned the house into a mammoth minimalist sculpture, a formidable box that occupies its corner lot with the weight and density of an anvil. Yet seen at close range, the paint is still translucent enough to disclose the lines where successive stages of new brickwork were added over the years, sedimentary layers of the building's history. "I want you to be able to read the story of the place," Adjaye says.

That house does have street-side windows. At street level there's one line of reflective-glass squares set flush with the wall surface. Another line at the second story is deeply recessed to emphasize the thickness of the walls. All the same, the first impression is of a place that's dark and impregnable. But as with the Elektra house, there's a surprise inside: the interiors are so filled with light that you could read a sundial in any of the rooms. To cross the threshold from the mildly forbidding exterior to the glowing entry hall is like removing Darth Vader's helmet to find that it was Tinkerbell underneath it the whole time.

"Dark tones are as powerful for me as colors," Adjaye explains. "Shadow is just as important as light. In the modernist canon, light equals well-being. But I think it's sad that certain colors have been relegated to the realm of noncolor because of superstitious and simplistic associations."

The very success of his celebrity houses has made Adjaye sensitive about being tagged a designer to the glam pack. He has also designed an arts center in one of London's poorer neighborhoods, and his upcoming Boston-area magnet school is the focus of some of his most intense enthusiasm--which, for a man with Adjaye's energy, is saying something.

It remains to be seen whether Adjaye can reconcile his ideas about an architecture of community with his artist's taste for buildings that stand apart from their surroundings--like Frank Gehry's or Frank Lloyd Wright's--as one-of-a-kind sculptural objects. What can architecture be when art comes first? There are a lot of approaches to that question. What Adjaye is providing is some answers you should know about.