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The outstanding architect’s remit for his latest project is badly flawed
Some time in the 1990s I went into a noodle bar, the look of which had a certain something. I asked who had designed it and was given the card of the then unknown architects Adjaye and Russell. Half of that now former partnership, David Adjaye, has just won the Royal Gold Medal for architecture. It is deserved: he has a particular skill for making the surfaces of buildings animate and arresting. His National Museum of African American History and Culture does an outstanding job of holding its own with the great white monuments of Washington DC, while also, as it must, announcing its own identity.
Yet I find myself lined up, in a public inquiry later this month, to give evidence against a project on which he is working with two other practices, the UK Holocaust memorial and learning centre proposed near the Houses of Parliament. This is not because I think Adjaye is a terrible architect, still less because I oppose the aim of remembering the Holocaust. It is because I believe that, ever since this project was announced by David Cameron in January 2016, it has had the hallmarks of too many of the former prime minister’s ideas: a seemingly cost-free political win (who could object to such a memorial?), accompanied by glibness in conception and laziness about detail. Continue reading...