Adjaye Quotes

#1. 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

#2. Financial institutions make us nervous when they're trying to do well.

Charlie Munger

#3. When I go to movies and I love the movie, it's because it feels like it articulated something about how we're living now, and also gives me some insight into my own life. I feel actually altered after having seen it.

Josh Radnor

#4. I have no other self than the totality of things of which I am aware.

Alan W. Watts

#5. Talent is commonly developed at the expense of character.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#6. The only valid political system is one that can handle an imbecile in power without suffering from it

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

David Adjaye

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. Africa is an extraordinary opportunity at the moment

David Adjaye

#11. Most learning problems exist not within the child but in the inadequacy of the system to find a way to teach them.

Gay Su Pinnell

#12. Most of the women correspondents couldn't make a marriage last. We'd tasted too much of life on our own terms and you didn't find men who could manage with that.

Phyllis Edgerly Ring

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

David Adjaye

#14. 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

#15. The essence of real creativity is a certain playfulness, a flitting from idea to idea without getting bogged down by fixated demands. Of course, you don't always get what you thought you were asking for.

Vernor Vinge

#16. 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

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

David Adjaye

#18. 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