Original subtitles

Narrator: In Washington,

scene of the biggest protest in the history

of America's civil rights movement,

the British architect Sir David Adjaye

has designed a museum for the ages.

It documents the struggle by African-Americans

to be "free at last".

This is a very important piece of democratic theatre,

and the African American community felt that

they should be represented.

The narrative about their contribution to what America is

needed to be represented.

I made a conscious decision

that the building was not going to be a vessel

just to put things in.

It wasn't going to be just a sort of piece of architecture

that would have something put in it that had a disconnect.

It felt that the story was so prescient

that the building had to also be part of the narrative.

It had to be part of the story.

[rhythmic piano music]

Narrator: Venice.

The British-Ghanaian architect David Adjaye

has arrived for the Art Biennale.

He is overseeing Ghana's pavilion,

its wall made of the country's soil,

its displays by Ghanaian artists,

the first time Ghana has participated in the Biennale.

Tomorrow, Adjaye will greet the country's first lady

and show her around.

Sir David, as we call him now

after he was knighted by the Queen,

is increasingly involved with his African roots.

He's designed the new National Cathedral

in Ghana's capital, Accra -

the latest in a line of high-profile projects

around the world.

But though his work in Africa is important to him -

he was born in Tanzania, the son of a Ghanaian diplomat -

you get the sense that he's particularly proud

of the National Museum

of African American History and Culture in Washington.

Designed for the Smithsonian,

given a place of honour on the National Mall,

a repository for the artefacts and letters

and photographs and memories of a struggle for civil rights

that consumed the United States for much of the 20th century.

It was, said some, a museum which was long overdue.

From the Declaration of Independence, really,

there's a cry for the representation of this community

to be part of the national consciousness.

And, you know, at the beginning of the 21st century,

finally, first under Bush

but made possible through the Obama administration,

finally this building is here.

Narrator: David Adjaye, acting as design lead,

came together with Philip Freelon

and J Max Bond Jr,

both prominent African American architects

working in the US, to take on this project.

[soaring orchestral music]

Few architects face the twin challenges

of designing a building

at the very heart of the nation's capital

and creating a building

that will mark for all time the role of African-Americans

in the life of this nation and their fight to be free.

David: The Mall is a fantastic construction.

It is this idea of America placing what it values most

in its monumental core for the world to see.

It's where anybody who wants to understand

what America is really should go.

You see the monuments to Lincoln, to Jefferson,

the Founding Fathers.

You see the Washington Memorial Grounds,

where the great tragedies and monuments are celebrated.

But then you have the Mall itself

with its double alley of trees, very Beaux-arts inspired,

with its great museums aligning it.

And at the end, Congress -

you know, the power of this thing.

And the White House on the hill just behind

overlooking the entire thing.

This is a very important piece of democratic theatre.

And the African American community felt that

they should be represented.

Their narrative about their contribution to what America is

needed to be represented.

[soaring orchestral music]

Narrator: Far from being overawed by the honour

of being given a site on the National Mall,

it's clear that David Adjaye understood

the enormity of the task

and very quickly saw what references

would inform the look and feel of Washington's newest museum.

- I made a conscious decision

that the building was not going to be

a vessel just to put things in.

It wasn't going to be just a sort of piece of architecture

that would have something put in it that had a disconnect.

It felt that the story was so prescient

that the building had to also be part of the narrative.

It had to be part of the story.

I think that the story that even African-Americans

have sort of, have kind of...

that has faded into their distant memory

is their incredible roots to Central and West Africa.

You know, forget the countries, but Central and West Africa

and kingdoms of Central and West Africa before colonisation

were incredible places of shrines

and incredible architecture and monuments.

I wanted to make something

that would give a clue to the heritage of these people

from the continent,

but also show their transformation

and their difference.

So, the building uses the silhouette

of the shrines of the Yoruba -

for me the greatest craftsmen,

apart from maybe the Chokwe in Central Africa,

of kind of wood and bronze and metalsmithing, et cetera.

But it also then integrates into that

the lessons or the idea of the American birthing pool.

You know, labour.

They were brought to America to be the labour force

of creating America.

They were part of the agriculture,

they built the infrastructure, they built the architecture.

The White House is built by black slaves.

Congress is built by black slaves.

And, you know, this idea of labour

was very fascinating to me.

So, the skin of the building is really a manifestation

of all these ideas.

It's really the idea, for me,

something I became really fascinated in -

that most people think of the slave trade

and think of cotton picking,

but I wanted people to understand

also this notion that the African American community

built the infrastructure.

So, we looked at the architecture of Charleston

and Louisiana, these incredible mansions,

and researched which ones had been built by slaves,

realised that most of them had been.

When these mansions and these sort of gentry of the South

who owned the land and the slaves

didn't have enough money to buy the production,

the factory-produced industrial panels of the North -

you know, Boston was where the cast-iron factories were -

slaves would make them out of sand-cast,

handmade formwork in the South.

And I became so fascinated with that

and the connection to the incredible heritage

of the bronze masters of West Africa,

that somehow they were now the iron masters of the South,

creating this incredible, ornamental ironwork

for these grand houses.

And I felt in a way that

that was wonderful representation,

almost ascribed in architecture, in history,

to transfer to the 21st century

and sort of to encode in the building.

So, the building really manifests

a piece of ironwork from a house in Charleston,

where we sort of mapped with the computer

the DNA of the drawing of the metalwork

and turned it into an abstract drawing,

which is then tessellated

and almost like a Bosch drawing,

sort of flipped and mapped all over the building.

So really, what you're getting is kind of DNA of this person

who drew and made this thing

has now been made into a building

which references also

the monuments of the ancient kingdoms of West Africa.

So in a way, I'm sort of trying to describe,

in physical terms, how the identity of a person

can be also manifested in built form.

[singing on recording]

Narrator: All around this building

are the ghosts of those who fought so hard for equality.

It was here in Washington

that a quarter of a million people

from all over the country, black and white,

assembled for a peaceful demonstration in August 1963,

a demonstration that lives on in the collective memory,

not only for that famous speech by Dr Martin Luther King,

but also for its sheer size and impact.

Man: It was one of the finest hours,

maybe one of the finest days in American history.

I looked to my right,

I saw a multitude of young people.

Young volunteers in the movement, black and white.

I looked straight ahead and saw this sea of humanity.

Then I looked to my left.

I saw hundreds of young men,

black and white, up in the trees

to get a better view of the stage.

And I said to myself, "This is it."

We're going to march.

We're going to walk together.

We're going to stand together. We're going to sing together.

We're going to stay together.

We're going to moan together. We're going to groan together.

And after a while, we'll shout, "Freedom! Freedom! Freedom now!"

We came to Washington to put on the American agenda

the problem and issue

of segregation and racial discrimination.

I remember so well...

..coming up to Capitol Hill for the first time,

meeting with legislators, Democrats and Republicans.

Then leaving to walk with Martin Luther King Jr

and others to the Lincoln Memorial.

I think this march will go down as one of the greatest,

if not the greatest demonstration

for freedom and human dignity

ever held in the United States.

[gospel singing]

Narrator: The 1963 march on Washington

is commemorated in the museum,

along with seminal events at places such as Selma, Alabama,

where civil rights leader John Lewis,

now a long-serving congressman

and one of those behind the creation of this museum,

attempted to lead a march to the state capital, Montgomery,

in a battle to secure the right to vote.

- The march from Selma to Montgomery...

..is as fresh as the morning dew

in my mind.

We got within hearing distance of the state troopers.

One of the young men leading the march with me

said, "Major, give us a moment to kneel and pray."

And the major said, "Troopers, advance."

They came toward us, beating us with nightsticks...

..bull whips...

..tramping us with horses,

releasing the teargas.

I was hit in the head by a state trooper

with a nightstick.

I thought I was going to die.

I thought I saw death.

The photographs from Selma on that day

went all over America and went around the world.

The American people couldn't stand what they saw

and they demanded that the president

and members of Congress act.

Narrator: It is the memories of John Lewis,

his fellow civil rights leaders,

and all African-Americans who struggle for equality

that will be preserved in the National Museum

of African American History and Culture.

As the project gets underway,

the founding director, Lonnie Bunch,

says what everyone's thinking -

"This building will sing for all of us."

David Adjaye came to Britain at the age of nine.

By then, he's lived in Tanzania, Yemen, Lebanon and Egypt.

He won RIBA bronze medal

for the best design project produced by a student

graduating as a Bachelor of Arts,

so he was recognised early on

and it wasn't long before he formed

an architecture partnership with classmate William Russell,

and then, at the turn of the century, went it alone.

Nine years later, as the recession hit,

his practice almost collapsed.

It's been a hell of a rollercoaster. [laughs]

Yeah, no, I think learning very hard in 2008

that architecture also has to be a form...

You know, when you hire lots of people

and you make a project, you make projects,

and then you realise that actually,

there's a recession globally

and you don't have any more work!

And that you're gonna go bankrupt.

I can laugh about it now, but it was the most horrific thing.

I remember calling my mother and I was more disappointed,

you know, talking to my parents then,

'cause I just felt like I'd let them down.

That they'd educated me,

they'd spent all this money on me to be who I was,

and I'd told them I wanted to be somebody in architecture -

they had no idea what it was and they were like,

"We can't help you, but if you believe in it, do it."

They supported me financially, et cetera, and here I was

about to collapse the entire thing into the ground.

I was so depressed.

But in a way, it taught me a huge lesson

about the importance of being conscious

about the entire life-cycle of the business

that I wanted to get in,

and to also focus on the things that actually meant...

made sense to me and meant most to my calling

to do architecture.

So in a way, it refined my direction.

It let me understand that I needed to put in tools

that would create sustainability within what I wanted.

But it also led me to realise that I need to go for work

that would be critical to my intellectual pursuit,

but also economically allow the firm to survive.

So...

you know, sometimes you have to have failure

before you can understand where you need to go,

and I did my time.

Narrator: Among the commissions that saved Adjaye's studio

was an invitation to join a team of architects

working on the proposed Museum

of African American History and Culture in Washington.

It required a presentation to a board

that included General Colin Powell,

former First Lady Barbara Bush, and Oprah Winfrey.

I was trembling. [laughs]

Sort of meeting your heroes and, you know,

canonal figures to make a presentation

was probably one of the most traumatic moments -

traumatic and exhilarating moments - of my career.

But they got it.

They were profound and their immediate...

You know, it sort of reinforced to me at that moment,

wow, that this subject, it comes out of the mind of a person,

but actually, it's shared, it's a human knowledge.

And somehow, there's an instinctive understanding

when something makes sense.

And I loved that moment in that jury space,

when they clapped when we presented.

It was powerful.

We didn't even know if we'd won then,

but I was just so enraptured by that sort of response

from this incredible, august group of people.

Then we found out two weeks later that we won.

Yeah. [chuckles]

Narrator: Though David Adjaye would design private houses

for everyone from Alexander McQueen

to Ewan McGregor

and be knighted in 2017 for services to architecture,

the Washington museum marks a point in his life

at which he started refining the concept of 'making memory'.

In an exhibition at London's Design Museum,

making memory looms large.

The Mass Extinction Memorial Observatory -

MEMO for short -

dedicated to the 860 species

of animals, birds, insects and sea life

that have become extinct

since the dodo died out in the 17th century.

It's proposed for a coastal site at Portland.

A planned memorial to Martin Luther King

and Coretta Scott King in Boston,

where they studied and met,

with their words engraved on black slate.

And the controversial UK Holocaust memorial

proposed for the gardens to the west

of the Houses of Parliament,

all of a piece with Adjaye's quote,

"You only make a better future if you question the past."

So, the National Museum

of African American History and Culture

fits with David Adjaye's mission.

He is acutely aware

that architects make the physical world

and his quest is to take places like this to another level.

As he says, the monument is no longer a representation.

It's an experience of time and place

that is available to everyone.

[staccato piano]

I think that architecture is there

to give us a dignified frame

and to remind us of our humanity.

And to remind us of the ability of art to unify us

and to let us kind of reach for our better selves.

I really believe that architecture's role

in creating these beautiful frames

are not just to do with tropes of empire.

Of course they are, but they are to kind of

really talk about something bigger than that.

And I think that even more, more than ever,

I think the time that we live in,

with what I call the sort of memory loss of history

and the lessons of history that's happening...

Which is ironic because we have the greatest tool invented

since the beginning of, you know, time - the internet -

which should remind us all of everything.

We are practising the most extraordinary

erasure of history!

At a time when we have the greatest amount of knowledge

about the history.

Architecture has to come back into the physical realm,

not to reinforce stereotypes

but to kind of reinforce our common humanity,

our ties, our relationships to each other.

I think that that's a critical readjustment

of the notion of the city which is gonna happen globally.

I really believe this.

We became so obsessed with just building,

just making money, just building,

just creating value.

And in fact, you know, it's no irony

that funds started to see architecture

as a great haven for parking money so that you would...

Architecture suddenly became commodified,

rather than becoming an image of our civilisation.

I think all the good architects in the world

now are realising that there has to be resistance to this.

It's fine to be commercial, but to a certain point.

Our remit as architects are twofold.

We work to the brief,

but we also have an eye to history

and we also have an eye to our humanity,

our common humanity.

[staccato piano]

We are the guardians that fight for the invention

and the reinvention

and the re-codification of the public realm.

It's up to architects, as we identify the cities,

to keep reinventing what that public realm is,

how it can still give us our dignity and our common humanity,

and I think the minute it stops doing that,

we are in trouble, we are in real trouble.

Narrator: In Washington, you may wonder

how a museum like this starts.

The idea of a monument to African-Americans

on a prominent site in the nation's capital

had been around for a long time,

but somehow, it never seemed to get built.

And when the moment finally came,

the agreement to proceed was only part of the story.

Now it was the turn of the architect.

I think my work is very much a kind of reflection

after a deep dive into a lot of information.

I start not with images - there are no images in my mind.

I start with a feeling about the work

and then I dive into a lot of information.

I spend a lot of time going through manuscripts,

documents that are, in a way, my little bit of detective work,

really trying to piece together and understand

the way in which the work sort of for he has driven

a certain kind of emotion in me.

I'm trying to kind of make sense

of why this emotion is the way it is.

And then from that, I would say a form,

not in the sense of a literal form, but a form,

a figure of the project starts to emerge in my head.

And that's when sketching starts.

Then after the research, a huge amount of sketching.

And then after that, it stops

and then a huge amount of testing.

Then my team get involved,

and then there's a kind of huge amount

of using computational tools and modelling

to really test and make sense of ideas.

And then we start making it into the thing

that becomes a building in the end.

Narrator: Though there is something else.

Along the way, in designing this museum,

and in David Adjaye's remarkable career generally,

as his ideas on life and history and commemoration

have been refined, and come to define him,

one thing has been constant -

the idea of art in architecture.

[piano music ends]

In architecture, I don't want to be hierarchical,

but it is the first art form.

It is the primary art form.

You know, the idea of memorialising a place

with an abstraction which is called architecture,

which has no real functional idea

except to acknowledge our presence on the planet

and to talk about our aspirations

for something greater than ourselves.

You know, our sense of being here for a long time.

You know, I can't say the 'forever' word,

but there's that sense of "we are here".

It's a very powerful thing

and I think that that's, for me,

the eternal beauty of architecture,

that architecture has this profound ability to go past...

..even the kind of everyday existence of our lives.

Look at this building.

We're in any building which is 500 years old.

It's now a hotel. It didn't start off as a hotel.

And look at how it lives for us and how we use it

as a reference to understand our own dignity

and our own humanity.

I think great architecture at its best

is able to capture something in its time

and create an amazing time capsule

that reminds generations that are coming of our humanity,

of our common humanity

and of our intelligence and of our beauty.

Narrator: In 2009, David Adjaye and his fellow architects

working on the Washington Museum

could not have guessed that its completion

would coincide with a resurgence of white nationalism.

After all, the nation's first black president

had only just started his second term.

In 2013, America marked the 50th anniversary

of the assassination of President Kennedy,

whose early attempts to introduce a Civil Rights Act

were taken up by his successor, Lyndon Johnson.

This is a sad time for all people.

We have suffered a loss that cannot be weighed.

Narrator: In 2015, President Obama

joined Congressman John Lewis

to commemorate the Selma to Montgomery march,

which had finally gone ahead in the spring of 1965

and would help secure proper voting rights

for African-Americans,

the spirit of those times captured

in LBJ's historic "we shall overcome" speech

to the joint houses of Congress.

It is wrong...

..deadly wrong to deny any of your fellow Americans...

..the right to vote in this country.

[applause]

There is no Negro problem.

That is no Southern problem.

There is no Northern problem.

There is only an American problem.

[applause]

What happened in Selma is part of a far larger movement,

which reaches into every section and state of America.

It is the effort of American Negroes

to secure for themselves

the full blessings of American life.

Their cause must be our cause too.

Because it's not just Negroes,

but really it's all of us...

..who must overcome

the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice.

And we shall overcome.

[applause]

Narrator: But by 2016,

the national mood was very different.

Adjaye: We had a window with Obama that we thought,

"Wow, haven't we made incredible progress?"

And then we see the rise of the right

all over the world again, as though we'd forgotten.

Just, for me, tragically,

at a time when the generation who shed their blood

have started to pass away.

There are very few of them left to tell us

how horrific these conflicts can be on our world.

And just as they're going, we kind of resurge...

almost a tabula rasa,

and that tells me that it's a continual effort.

We never get past it

and we have to always ascribe against this forgetting

of the traumas of extreme thinking.

It's deeply, deeply depressing.

And you know, my father fought

in the Second World War, you know.

He was part of the small African contingents

who came to Europe and North Africa to fight.

And so, you know, even in Africa, the world war,

that was mostly in Europe, really touched families.

And I just could never even imagine that

that was something that could ever happen again

when I heard him talking about that as a little boy.

For the first time in my life, I sort of feel like,

"My God, we're on the precipice again of absolute horror."

And I just can't abide that.

Narrator: It's against that background

that the African American Museum has opened

and, says David Adjaye,

the museum itself and the story it tells

is the best way to reply to those who would rewrite history.

- We wanted to not make a traditional palace.

You know, a sort of portico, come in, big hall, stair,

and then rooms that you sort of ride into,

but to turn the building almost into its own narrative.

So, you come in and unlike going into a big hall

and then going sideways, you go down 40 feet into the ground.

And then you descend another 40 feet into darkness.

And from that darkness, you are immersed in the history,

a summary of the history

where you meander through three careful terraces

which really break down, which are of summary of the narrative.

The agrarian past, the migration to the cities,

and then the cultural explosion that affects the world.

And that is the three tiers of the building that you see.

So, you sort of do that and at the end you get a moment.

Most people come out completely fatigued

and exhausted and traumatised.

A lot of people come out weeping

from having been immersed in the details of this history.

So, we created a special room, which is a reflecting room,

which is a space with a giant...

It's a 30-foot room with a waterfall

that descends into a chamber.

I wanted water to be a sort of element of community.

I mean, water is the baptism,

the middle passages over the Atlantic.

Water is the great device used right from the 15th century

right through to the industrial age to power things.

It is for agriculture, for barges and movement.

So in a way, they are part of the way

in which water is used to mechanise the landscape.

And then water becomes the litmus of salvation.

It's the spirituality in the African American churches

where the resistance is built.

Water...the baptism to kind of wish for a better world

is through water.

So in a way, this idea of this kind of

large descent of water which neutralises noise

but allows the body to meditate on something else,

was an important room to make.

And it's lined, actually, in a bronze skin

laminated in the glass to remind you of the origins.

So in a way, the bronze of the Yoruba

and then the waterfall the baptism

and hopefully the reflection.

[uplifting piano]

Then after that, you rise up.

You realise that it's almost, for me,

I hope the people see the building in that moment

almost like a tree.

It's like you go from the ground into the sky,

and then you go into the sky

but it's a kind of dappled light.

It's diaphanous, you get fantastic vignettes.

But you're in something,

you feel like you're enclosed in something.

And you rise through to the other two exhibition spaces,

and at every point you are given a perch to view something.

There are nine special windows in the building

which view what I call

the kind of key monumental sort of frames

from that position.

The Lincoln, as I've said,

Jefferson, Martin Luther King now,

the Reflecting Pool, Congress,

the National Archive, the White House

are all framed as you go through that journey in the upper space.

Until you get to the uppermost level,

where you get the most fantastic panorama

over the west-facing landscape,

looking at the Washington Memorial Grounds,

right up to Arlington.

It's a free sort of Juliet balcony

to this fantastic view of Washington,

which nobody else has.

And it's the end of the journey, as it were.

You get the overview after you've been through the history,

first in darkness

and then into this incredible light

and this incredible perspective.

Narrator: In Venice, David Adjaye pauses

to reflect on a life that involves almost constant travel.

He's come to the Venice Biennale from Ghana,

where he's been for three months,

via one day in London.

He doesn't do holidays much.

Novels are out, replaced by books by social thinkers

who are formulating ideas about the world.

His Ghana pavilion,

which proves a hit with visitors to the Biennale,

reflects his African heritage

and a desire to counter many people's image of the continent

on which he was born

and which supplied slaves to America,

their lives now recorded in Washington's

Museum of African American History and Culture.

I'm always questioning why I want to make architecture.

For me, architecture isn't a commercial act,

it isn't a business.

It's an ability to participate in history.

It's an ability to participate in the narratives

that kind of define who we are

and where we are in the 21st century.

[soft piano]

I'm interested in ascribing the complexities,

the struggles, the opportunities

that this time has in architecture.

I'm enduring it. You know, there were people who said,

"How can you build such a thing in America?

"It doesn't make sense, it doesn't fit." You know.

I had it all, I had... you know, moments I was like,

"Am I doing the right thing?"

But that was my quiet sort of meditation.

But I was confident that it had to resonate.

[uplifting piano music]

It's amazing, when you make a piece of architecture

that then captures the consciousness of a nation

or a people.

It's very powerful.

And in a way, it's actually driven me more.

The work that I'm now doing

is driven by the kind of confidence of that.

That moment when Barack really opened this building in 2016.

I was there with my mother.

My father had just passed away, so he missed it.

But I was there with my mother and I was crying.

We were looking at each other and I was like,

son of a Ghanaian diplomat

who kind of left a small kingdom,

a village kingdom in Ghana,

brought his kids to Europe, educated, and now look -

we're sitting here looking at this thing.

It was a very, very moving moment. Very powerful.

[soaring orchestral theme music]

Narrator: Next time...

..locked up and unloved, the old Commonwealth Institute

in London's fashionable Kensington

faced an uncertain future.

Opened in 1962 as a permanent showcase

for the countries of the Commonwealth,

its unusual design proved costly to maintain -

so costly that in 2004,

the building was closed.

By then, this landmark on Kensington High Street,

with its unusual roof, had been listed Grade 2#*.

English Heritage called it "the second most important

"modern building in London" after the Royal Festival Hall.

Now it has a new life as home of the Design Museum,

with the exterior master plan handled by OMA

and the interior crafted by one of Britain's

greatest minimalists, John Pawson.

- You can never please everybody,

because of course there were people

who loved the Commonwealth Institute as it was

so didn't want anything changed.

And then there are people who realise that by saving it

and retuning it for the Design Museum

was perhaps a good thing.

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