Over the weekend, the $500 million National Museum of African-American History and Culture was opened by President Barack Obama in Washington, USA.
The building was designed by the Freelon Adjaye Bond/SmithGroup, a consortium of firms, led by a Ghanaian-British architect, David Adjaye. Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â
Adjaye, 50, told the BBC that the museum was a “living building", designed to understand black Americans' ongoing struggle for equality.
In an interview with the New York Times, he notes that the building is classical in its inspiration, with a base and capital, but it’s also not a classical building.
“It’s a very modern building in how contemporary thinking has been applied to material science and circulation. We wanted a building that wasn’t just about itself, but about its context and about the experience of consuming information in the museum,†he said.
Some of Adjaye’s recent works include works include the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver, the Nobel Peace Centre in Oslo, and the Skolkovo Moscow School of Management, completed in 2010.
Adjaye was born in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. The son of a Ghanaian diplomat, he lived in Tanzania, Egypt, Yemen and Lebanon before moving to Britain at the age of nine.
He earned a BA at London South Bank University, before graduating with an MA in 1993 from the Royal College of Art.
In 2014, Adjaye married business consultant Ashley Shaw-Scott.
Adjaye was featured in an advertising campaign for British luxury brand Dunhill in 2012. Adjaye has also worked on numerous collaborative projects with his brother Peter Adjaye, a musician.
In 2006, Adjaye was shortlisted for the Stirling Prize for the Whitechapel Idea Store, built on the remains of a 1960s mall.
He received the title of OBE from the Queen in 2007 for services to British architecture. In 2016 he received the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's McDermott award, a $100,000 prize for excellence in the arts.
Adjaye is the principal architect behind Petronia City, which is being built in the Western Region.