INTERVIEW
IDEATION AND CREATION
TIMOTHY SOAR
ABOVE THE COMPETITION WINNER OF TWO NEW LIBRARIES IN THE GRITTY EAST LONDON BOROUGH OF TOWER HAMLETS, DAVID ADJAYE COMPLETED HIS
FIRST IDEA STORE LIBRARY AND EDUCATION CENTRE ON CHRISP STREET IN 2004. THE BUILDING’S COLOURFUL TRANSPARENCY DISSOLVES ANY SENSE OF
TREPIDATION OR INTIMIDATION. AND SUCCESSFULLY DRAWS IN THE NEIGHBOURHOOD IMMIGRANT COMMUNITY WHO HAVE APPROPRIATED IT AND THE
SURROUNDING PUBLIC SPACES AS THEIR OWN,
ON A RECENT VISIT TO TORONTO, ONE OF
GREAT BRITAIN’S HOHEST ARCHITECTS,
GHANAIAN-BORN DAVID ADJAYE DISCUSSES HIS
PROCESSES AND AHITUDES TOWARD CONTEM-
PORARY ARCHITECTURE.
INTERVIEWER IAN CHGDIKOFF
You have had the chance to hrieflv look around
Toronto. What are jour first iinpressiona?
DA 1 think that Toronto is an incredibly strong
city, LJsually, in most cities where there is a large
ethnic diaspora, the diasporas are quite friendly
but there is a sense of a tension. I don’t know if I
am completely off the mark, but I don’t sense tbe
ethnic tension in Toronto, There is an incredible
diversity in tbis city which seems to bode well in
business and design.
Howdo vou view the potential for materialitr to
express meaning that is dynamic and beyond
the aesthetic?
DA For me, materials don’t operate witbin a caste
group of tbeir own, they are very much agents in
the naming of spaces beyond the SOM [Skid -
more. Owings & Merrill] model, or the post-
Miesian model. I am completely uninterested in
materials as performance which space- making
often encompasses.
Cft/06 CANADIAN ARCHITEa 47

ABOVE, LEFT TO RIGHT BRILLIANTLY HUED RIBBONS OF COLOURED TRANSPARENT GLASS ENLIVEN THE ELEVATIONS OF THE CHRISP STREET IDEA STORE, A WEL-
COME SPOT OF CHEER IN AN ARCHITECTURALLY BLEAK NEIGHBOURHOOD; BUILDING ON THE SUCCESS OF THE FIRST IDEA STORE, THE SECOND FLA&
SHIP LOCATION ON WHITECHAPEL ROAD OPENED IN LATE 2005, AND INCLUDES A FIVE-STOREY LIBRARY TWO MORE VIEWS OF THE WHITECHAPEL ROAD
IDEA STORE OFFER A SENSE OF THE COMMUNITY FLAVOUR, SCALE AND SURROUNDING CONTEXT
You seem to like to juxtapose metal, fabric,
wood and steel injour designs where the mate-
riality seemingly transmogTifies from leather
to steel, and vice versa.
DA I am very much interested in the transmogri-
fication or transliteration of materials. The shift-
ing nf meaning is an important endgame. For me.
this is the very agency that architecture has. We
live in an age where materiality no longer has the
symbolic value that it used to have within popular
culture and in society. A hierarchy of materiality
no longer exists. I recently saw a McDonald’s
employ marble and ebony veneer, which was
quite shockingto me. I deploy oppositional rela-
tionships of materiality to reveal other qualities:
this is a motif that I use to drive the way of read-
ing materials. I always combine things tbat don’t
seem to belong together.
What about the social direction in jour work?
DA For Oslo [the Nobel Peace Center], it comes
back to allowing people to be empowered hy
their choice of materials. For me, rediscovering
the social or the public is what my work is really
all ahout. I am on a trajector;>’ of encounter.
"Social" is actually an overused and misunder-
stood word. Most architects understand the
word from a ’60s or ’yos definition, something
that Aldo van Eyck might have tried to convev.
For me. tbe question is how do you remake
architecture that re-engages again with society,
ensuring that this relationship is not futile.
Certainly, it can go awry like everything else, but
ihe ethical agency in architecture lies in the
engagement with people. This kind of critical
engagement is not a type of instrumentalized
analysis where a computer program and an
engineer states something like: "Thousands of
people flow this way, let’s make it this wide."
This kind of instrumentalization will only dis-
connect the experience of a human. This is what
road designers do. It’s interesting that postwar,
the landscape of engineering which uses that
syntax and thinking, and the landscape of tbe
city are colliding twins that create a landscape of
trauma. For me, the idea that you arrive at an
ethical position in finding an aesthetics of
understanding form through critical engage-
ment does not deny but heightens radicalism,
albeit not in the formalistic sense.
Just as people learn how to develop an aware
ne8s ofthe ingredients they use when cooking.
tbere is a level of Tnaterial literacy in jour
designs at various scaJes. How do you push your
clients and include jour communities? Do jou
have a didactic approach that allows an
endgame to result?
DA As one gets a name, it becomes less about
convincing the client ofthe strategies that one
deploys. The arguments we used to make about
materiality and materials which were not valued
as building materials are gone. It has moved to a
different level of discussion. I kind of enjoyed
that resistance because it allowed so much ques-
tioning. The engagement of community is not
about what materiality is best, or a kind of token-
istic consultation. If we use the culinaTy model, it
is really about the presentation of the familiar
the food as it were but presented in a way that
engages you. It is incumbent on the profession to
expose the potential and the weakness ofthe
range within what is considered to be familiar.
I question the ethical judgement of architecture
as a manoeuvre that says "this is the right way."
The "right way" is how long does this want to be
CANADIAN ARCHITECT C«/