David Adjaye Quotes

#1. Africa is an extraordinary opportunity at the moment

David Adjaye

#2. The thing about architecture is that it's an art [you] simply learn more by doing more. It's one of those things that is really not an art about thinking, but doing. So in a way, what it has done is greatly intensify the way that I build.

David Adjaye

#3. Context is so important, not to mimic but to become part of the place. I wanted a building that acknowledges its surroundings.

David Adjaye

#4. The first 10 years, I was just building just to understand what I was doing and I didn't trust my intuition to just produce. Then, in the last five years, I have really been reflecting on what I am producing and what it is doing.

David Adjaye

#5. If you just live in New York and you only know New York, you know a certain kind of condition of formality and informality. By being able to go to another context and to be able to use that as a counter foil to the context you know, you are about to see a wider range.

David Adjaye

#6. For me, architecture is a social act,

David Adjaye

#7. Buildings for me represent opportunities of agency, transformation, and storytelling. They are not just artifacts. There is this big tradition of buildings-as-artifacts - constructed artifacts - but for me they are these incredible sites of negotiation.

David Adjaye

#8. Buildings are deeply emotive structures which form our psyche. People think they're just things they maneuver through, but the makeup of a person is influenced by the nature of spaces.

David Adjaye

#9. The houses [my first project in London] were reactions to the condition of the city and my frustrations with the norms that were being played out. In a way they were slightly subconscious but reactions to that condition and a way to posit new possibilities within certain pervasive norms.

David Adjaye

#10. I'm totally into architecture for all strata of society. High design should not just be for rich people.

David Adjaye