David Adjaye

I mean, I've been so focused on the stuff that's coming out of the, the Trump administration.

I mean, eventually one hopes that, you know, the Smithsonian has plans for expansion, and probably one of the most prominent recent, relatively recent buildings was David Adjaye's building for the National Museum of African American History and Culture.

Mm-hmm.

So if they build the Women's Museum or the Hispanic Museum, hopefully those will be two, um, you know, blue chip firms and, and there'll be a proper contest and, uh, a real effort to kind of make those worthy of the prominence that they'll have.

And that's exactly what she did.

And those little libraries are quite extraordinary.

Again, David Adjaye did two of them, and, and they're remarkable buildings.

Um, I know he's had controversy recently, but it doesn't diminish from the quality of the buildings that were built.

However, the black on black violence paradigm, so-called, is never used in that way as a kind of psychological self-hatred model.

It's used to give the public essentially the ridiculous impression that black school teachers, black doctors, black lawyers, black Premier League footballers, my grandmother, David Adjaye, Oswald Boateng, are all sort of an equal risk of violent crime.

yes london does have a disproportionate share of knife crime incidents roughly a third of the country's total nobody is denying that london has major major issues i mean someone literally died on my doorstep a few years ago someone got shot at my street a couple of years ago so you know there's always been issues where i grew up and there's been multiple stabbings and shootings in my area over the last six or seven months it is a crazy time and yes Within that, around half of the victims and offenders are from Black and Asian.

No one denies that, but the context is why this is important.

That, that's an argument you could make.

[laughs] I mean, the David Adjaye building on the very outskirts of the development at great expense was probably the wrong ...

Anyway, ultimately it got liquidated by a big bank.

The elephant-

It's just a trigger that I sort of have.

And I think I got the confidence to do that from someone like David Adjaye, who has this obscure way of doing what he does.

It's almost like you don't know how I'm going to come to this result.

Yeah, I have cues from African culture and things like that, but ultimately there is a very specific personal way that the auteur we'll figure that out, kind of like with Niemeyer as well, or like with Mendes de Rocha, no, sorry, Soto de Moura.

You brought up, man, hate to ask this question.

Okay.

You brought up David Adjaye.

Yeah.

And that he did with Phil Freelon.

Yep, Phil Freelon, David Adjaye, Smith Group, and of course a lot of other consultants, it being a museum.

But that was a project that Bond began to really advocate for, not just to get the commission, but to get the museum involved.

realized beginning in the early 1990s, long before, well, right as the legislation was passed initially, but long before it was signed ultimately into the final legislation that authorized it in the early 2000s.