David Adjaye: Making Memory
Thought provoking exhibition at the Design Museum looking at the work of architect David Adjaye.
Adjaye’s work has
featured a lot of work on monuments and this show focused on seven of these
projects using scale models, photographs and recreation of the spaces. Each
project had a section with a video of Adjaye explaining the work. Not all of
the works have been built yet so it will be interesting to these new exciting
projects and how they develop.
The first project
you see is the Gwangju River Reading Room, a pavilion on the banks of the river
offering a space where people can exchange books and ideas in memory of an
uprising in 1980. Bookcases supported the weight of the roof representing the
idea of knowledge as support.
The National
Museum of African American History and Culture looks amazing and made me really
want to visit Washington DC again. It is a vast building with eight floors,
four below ground looking at slavery and emancipation and the four above
covering civil rights and the future. The entrance creates a public space on
The Mall and the shape is based on the crowns in Nigerian statues. So
beautifully thought out.
Of the spaces to
come I particularly excited by the UK Holocaust Memorial and Learning Centre
which is planned for Victoria Tower Gardens next to the Houses of Parliament
and close to where I work. It will have 23 bronze fins creating paths into the
learning area. I was surprised to read that the UK is the last of the countries
involved in the Second World War to build a holocaust memorial.
Another planned
structure is to animals which have become extinct to be built on the Isle of
Portland, It will be a stone walkway lined with carvings of the species which
are extinct which I felt reflected the idea of fossils. It looks like a
Guggenheim for animals.
Closes on 5 May
2019
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