David Adjaye
Making his major-league U.S. debut next summer with his Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver, 40-year-old David Adjaye, already a luminary in Britain, is being touted by some as the next global “starchitect,” ready to mix it up with the Gehrys, Libeskinds, Pianos, and Koolhaases. Adjaye’s projects include the new Nobel Peace Center in Oslo, community centers in low-income neighborhoods, artists’ studios, town-square markets, libraries, even homes for the likes of actor Ewan McGregor and photographer Juergen Teller. But he has no signature style, no recognizable aesthetic: His houses are stark and uninviting wedges; his “Idea Store” libraries are bright and busy, more shopping malls than temples of silence. He opts for cheap poured concrete, chipboard, sawn plywood or asphalt, and anti-graffiti paint, where other architects choose marble, maple, or glass. “I have a signature attitude, not a signature aesthetic,” he says.
Adjaye describes himself as a “conceptual architect,” and his A-list contemporary-art connections inform much of his work (he studied at the Royal College of Art in London with the so-called Saatchi generation of young British artists such as Chris Ofili and Jake and Dinos Chapman). “The really profound effect that artists have on architects is in their visual sensitivity,” says Terence Riley, former chief curator of architecture and design at MoMA, and now director of the Miami Art Museum. “I think Adjaye’s work has this retinal quality.” Thelma Golden, director of the Studio Museum in Harlem, which will show Adjaye’s work next July, agrees. “There has always been a deep relationship between contemporary art and architecture,” she says. “But Adjaye embeds his relationships with artists in an ongoing process of collaborative thinking. His public spaces seem to liberate the people who use them. He’s a change agent with the potential to transform the way we consider what architecture can be.” Born in Dar es Salaam but raised in Egypt, Yemen, Lebanon, and finally London, Adjaye is one of only a handful of black architects in Britain and takes his visual cues from the shantytowns of Africa and street markets of India. “In the West, design is about modifications or adjustments to something that already exists,” he says. “But in Asia and Africa, design is about how the human spirit invents and survives–and I find that more inspiring.” –Ian Wylie
Jennifer Siegal
As a graduate student at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (better known as SCI-Arc), Jennifer Siegal wasn’t worried about landing a dream internship. Instead, she opened a hot dog cart. It wasn’t glamorous, but it helped pay for school–and got her thinking about mobile architecture. These days, the 40-year-old founder of the Office of Mobile Design in Venice, California, is helping reawaken the mid-20th-century dream of roving homes and instant dwellings. In doing so, she is just one designer of many, but her experience and foresight are exceptional. “She was one of the first to put a stake in the ground–not because it’s trendy, but because it has always interested her,” says Allison Arieff, the former editor-in-chief of Dwell magazine. Siegal finds inspiration in sources as varied as Southeast Asian street vendors, Bedouin rug merchants–“mobile entrepreneurs,” she calls them–even Archigram, the visionary 1960s architecture collaborative. Yet her perspective is solidly contemporary: “I’m interested in how technology is influencing the way we form communities,” she says.
Many of Siegal’s proposals remain unrealized–an Internet port on wheels, for example (Wi-Fi took care of that), or the Hydra House, a mass-producible, portable, floating “survival structure”–but her work is already reshaping the way we think about buildings. For example, her Mobile Eco Lab is a repurposed trailer that teaches children and the poor about the environment; her Portable Construction Training Center is a mobile home that educates people who may want to join the building trades. She has developed a “mobile event city” for a firm that hosts multiday outdoor charity events and has even proposed an artists’ community made of modular steel-frame buildings for downtown L.A. Her work with prefab components and off-the-shelf parts includes a model house erected in Venice this summer using eco-friendly bamboo and insulating polycarbonates; a prefab middle school in North Hollywood is also in the works. What’s more, as editor of the publication Materials Monthly, she promotes “a future of innovative materials that are light, strong, and reusable,” she says. “Because our lifestyles are demanding more lightness and flexibility, our buildings shouldn’t be sitting so heavy.” –Aric Chen
