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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