The Rise and Fall of David Adjaye

George and Ira Gershwin’s jaunty 1937 song “Nice Work If You Can Get It” begins with this wry observation about the fickleness of renown:

The man who lives for only making money
Lives a life that isn’t necessarily sunny;
Likewise the man who works for fame—
There’s no guarantee that time won’t erase his name.

Today the name of David Adjaye, the fifty-nine-year-old Ghanaian British architect who less than three years ago was at the pinnacle of his career, has been erased with record speed. Last fall, when three important buildings by his office were completed on two continents—the Princeton University Art Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Museum of West African Art in Benin City, Nigeria—Adjaye was conspicuously absent from the American inaugural festivities and barely mentioned in those institutions’ publicity materials. (Press releases for the two US museums stressed the contributions of Cooper Robertson, the projects’ New York–based executive architectural firm, also called the architect of record, which oversaw implementation of the designs, but such firms are seldom accorded equal credit.) A New York Times headline in October noted, “A Star Architect’s Buildings Soar. He’s Nowhere to Be Seen.” This blanket omission marked an astonishing reversal of fortune for Adjaye, who had been poised to become the profession’s next international superstar and seemed a shoo-in to win the coveted Pritzker Prize.

As if to confirm the truism that architects don’t hit their stride until they turn fifty, Adjaye first won widespread attention when his National Museum of African American History and Culture of 2009–2016 on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., was completed in the year he reached that landmark birthday. The dedication ceremony was led by Barack Obama (who on a later occasion declared Adjaye’s work “genius, pure and simple”) and was a high point of both his presidency and the DEI movement. And although it was preordained that this extraordinarily symbolic commission on “America’s front lawn” would go to a Black architect—all six firms in the invitational competition included at least one Black principal—the unanimity of praise that greeted the finished work fully justified Adjaye’s selection.

The museum’s majestically proportioned exterior, with a silhouette inspired by Yoruba tribal crowns, is wrapped in three broad horizontal tiers of bronze-colored metal latticework that flares upward and outward. The contrast between this boldly abstract composition, at once striking and dignified, and the predominant Classical style and pale masonry of the other museums along the National Mall, among them the National Gallery of Art and the National Museum of Natural History, speaks to the hard-won place Black Americans have attained in any credible reckoning of our nation’s history.

Adjaye’s design, however, was sorrily diminished because his plans were subjected to overzealous value engineering, a process in which a client’s project manager substitutes materials, assembly techniques, or detailing specified by the architect with less expensive alternatives. For example, the bronze paneling Adjaye wanted for the museum’s exterior was replaced with cheaper and less heavy bronze-tinted aluminum, though with no great loss of effect. The building’s cavernous but sketchily realized interior suffers most: in some places it looks so unformed and provisional that one wonders if construction is still underway.

Fortunately, the attention of most visitors is diverted by the inventive and often deeply moving displays by Ralph Appelbaum Associates that chart the four-century history of African Americans’ enslavement and long struggle for freedom and equality in the US. (The future of this monument to the contributions of a people for whom President Trump has shown the utmost contempt is perilous, since he targeted the entire Smithsonian system, of which it is a part, in a 2025 executive order aimed at what he called its “improper ideology.”)

Winning the African American museum competition led to Adjaye’s receiving a flood of other enviable commissions, and his practice prospered at a moment when many progressive patrons were eager to select an architect of color. Someone who was born in Africa and so manifestly talented proved an irresistible combination. The Robb Report typified the rhapsodic international press coverage when it dubbed Adjaye “the world’s most beguiling public architect.”

In 2021 the Royal Institute of British Architects gave him its Royal Gold Medal (previously awarded to Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, and Alvar Aalto, among others), and he was knighted in 2017 by Queen Elizabeth II, who also named him to the Order of Merit shortly before her death in 2022. Adjaye’s private life appeared equally charmed. In a 2014 ceremony at London’s St. Paul’s Cathedral, he married Ashley Shaw-Scott, a Stanford-educated Californian of Nigerian and Russian Finnish descent. Shaw-Scott, a former fashion model, has a degree in business management and is head of research for the Adjaye office, as well as a cofounder of Stories of Us, a nonprofit art group that organizes exhibitions to illuminate the Black experience in America. The couple have two children and divide their time among homes in London, New York, and Accra.

Then, on July 4, 2023—a few weeks after Adjaye was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters as an international honorary member—it all came crashing down when the Financial Times published a devastating exposé headlined “Sir David Adjaye: The Celebrated Architect Accused of Sexual Misconduct.” Meticulously reported by Josh Spero and Anjli Raval and supported by a great deal of personal testimony and other evidence, the four-thousand-word article laid out excruciating accounts of Adjaye’s alleged sexual harassment or assault of three women who worked for his firm, all of whom asked not to be identified.

In one incident, Adjaye allegedly brought two female employees who had moved to Ghana to work at his firm’s Accra branch (he also has offices in London and New York) to his apartment after business hours. There he changed into a robe and steered them to a bedroom. One of the women left the room but remained in the apartment, reluctant to abandon her colleague. According to the article, the other woman said that Adjaye told her:

“You’ve just got to do this.” She continued: “I felt overpowered, both emotionally and physically… There was this domineering feeling of ‘I’m going to have my way with you, and that’s it.’”
[She] said her recollection of exactly what happened next is blurry, which is not uncommon with people who have experienced a traumatic event. But she remembered “feeling that his penis was on me” and described the incident as an assault….
The next day…Adjaye called her and requested that she meet him outside the apartment block, where she saw him taking money out of an ATM. After that he gave her around 4,000 Ghanaian cedi in cash (approximately £770). Adjaye did not acknowledge or apologise for the previous evening.

Both women decided to remain with the company after the incident because they needed the salary and didn’t want to uproot their children. One of them traveled to a business presentation with him in South Africa the following year. At the Johannesburg airport after their meeting, she says, he maneuvered her into a wheelchair-accessible bathroom and again tried to force sex on her:

Adjaye shoved her against the baby-changing table, reached under her skirt, pulled aside her underwear and pushed his penis against her. Despite her shock she said she pushed him back and yelled, “No, David!” She said he then ejaculated in the sink, fixed himself up and walked out the door.

In response to the story, a London-based crisis management firm issued a statement in Adjaye’s name denying the accusations. “I am ashamed to say that I entered into relationships,” he conceded, “which though entirely consensual, blurred the boundaries between my professional and personal lives. I am deeply sorry.” But he then undercut his protestations of innocence by announcing that “to restore trust and accountability, I will be immediately seeking professional help in order to learn from these mistakes to ensure they never happen again.” To make matters worse, after this semi-apology his firm’s London CEO, Lucy Tilley, complained to the British publication Building Design that the women’s charges were “really unfair” and insisted that “there are two sides to the story.” (The Financial Times stood by Spero and Raval’s reporting.)

With stunning rapidity Adjaye Associates began losing clients, among them the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool, the Africa Institute in the UAE, a county library in Oregon, and the Shelburne Museum in Vermont. The UK Holocaust Memorial in London, a collaboration between Adjaye and the Israeli industrial designer Ron Arad that began in 2018, has proceeded, but the architect has handed the project off to an associate. Although Adjaye’s damage control team asserted that he would “step back” from active involvement in his firm’s day-to-day operations, that locution is vague and evasive. Few observers believe that he has removed himself completely, and many suspect that he still exerts influence behind the scenes. He seems unrepentant: last November, in his first public comments about the scandal, which he delivered on the journalist Tim Abrahams’s podcast Superurbanism, Adjaye seemed to imply that his accusers were out to blackmail him and asserted that “there was just an interest in destroying me, and I got caught in a sort of version of the #MeToo slam.”

David Frank Adjaye was born in 1966 in Dar es Salaam, the capital of Tanzania, where his father, a Ghanaian career diplomat, was posted before being rotated every few years to embassies in Egypt, Kenya, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Uganda, and Yemen. His mother tended to the family, which included two older half-brothers from his parents’ previous marriages as well as two younger brothers. When Adjaye was thirteen, his father asked to be attached permanently to Ghana’s London embassy because the youngest son suffered from severe disabilities that could be better treated in Britain.

Adjaye received a BA in architecture from London South Bank University in 1990 and three years later completed the master’s program at the Royal College of Art. That school brought him into close contact with members of the emerging coterie known as the Young British Artists, which included Chris Ofili (who served as best man at Adjaye’s wedding) and the brothers Jake and Dinos Chapman. Adjaye began his building career by doing residential renovations, additions, and finally entire houses for numerous artists, including a London studio-residence for Jake Chapman, a Brooklyn townhouse for the artist couple Lorna Simpson and James Casebere, and a beach house for Ofili in Trinidad and Tobago. (In 2011 he also completed a beach house for former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan near Accra.)

Several masters of the early Modern Movement created remarkable series of small buildings for the same function that are neither repetitive nor dependent on size to appear important. One thinks of Louis Sullivan’s jewellike banks in the American Midwest during the early 1900s, Willem Marinus Dudok’s exemplary public schools of the 1920s in the Dutch city of Hilversum, and Dominikus Böhm’s highly original Catholic parish churches in Weimar Germany. Some contemporary architects likewise understand a particular building category with preternatural empathy, and for Adjaye that has been the neighborhood public library, several of which are among his finest buildings.

His Idea Store of 2003–2005 in the Whitechapel section of London was conceived by local planning authorities to supersede the traditional branch library as a welcoming, digitally advanced facility with a wide range of educational, vocational, and social support services. Hence the gimmicky name, as if the word “library” might frighten people away. On its inviting exterior, alternating vertical panels of colorless and blue-green glass allow views into the building, which is now heavily used and demonstrates that transparency increases traffic. (A considerably smaller but otherwise similar Idea Store was completed a year earlier elsewhere in the East End, and it has been no less popular.)

The comparably beneficial effect that two Adjaye libraries executed in 2012 have had on Washington, D.C., indicates that the Idea Store concept travels well. Like those British precursors, the Francis A. Gregory Library (which serves the city’s predominantly Black Southeast quadrant) is surfaced in glass. At first the building’s gold-tinted, harlequin-patterned exterior struck me as more suitable for Las Vegas than the nation’s capital. However, in time I came to appreciate that this unexpected color imparts warmth and sets the building apart from its drab surroundings, much as a Neoclassical turn-of-the-twentieth-century Carnegie library contrasted with nearby tenements. The William O. Lockridge/Bellevue Library in Southwest D.C. achieves the same effect differently with its wood beams, which are seldom used so visibly in urban settings these days. Both Washington designs have layouts that reveal the architect’s understanding of how libraries are now used, and they maximize space, especially internal circulation routes, in ways that add greatly to their appeal as social gathering places and anchors of their communities.

Architecture as an agent of social cohesion was a motivation behind the design of Adjaye’s Princeton University Art Museum (PUAM), which occupies a prominent site at the center of the tree-shaded New Jersey campus where the previous museum building, a jumbled pastiche of successive accretions, formerly stood. Although at 146,000 square feet the new structure is only about one fourth the size of Adjaye’s African American museum, one’s first impression is how out-of-scale PUAM looks, even amid other buildings that are scarcely recessive. To reduce its perceived size, Adjaye devised an interconnected cluster of nine rectangular pavilions with approximately similar dimensions. Most of them contain exhibition spaces, one is for the conservation department, and another houses the library. Offices and service areas are tucked beneath the pavilions, which do not touch the ground at their perimeters but are cantilevered atop recessed supporting walls to lighten their visual impact.

But the ploy doesn’t work, and the cantilevering of the chunky volumes recalls the balletic hippopotamuses dancing en pointe in Walt Disney’s Fantasia. The pavilions are clad in a gray concrete-and-pebble aggregate cast into sharp vertical pleats that add to the design’s defensive aura, which is heightened by the paucity of windows. When I first caught sight of this hulking interloper, the term Costco Brutalism crossed my mind, but on further reflection I decided that was inaccurate. The building lacks the urgency and forcefulness of Brutalism at its best and seems more like a genteel suburban Nordstrom than some big-box discount store.

In a futile attempt to further diminish PUAM’s bulk, its ground floor is recessed below street level, which requires visitors to descend a short flight of steps and enter the building through a slot between two of the pavilions. The open-roofed passageway brings to mind the Stygian nether regions of London’s Barbican Centre, a Brutalist landmark. The gloom induced by this grim forecourt is alleviated by a vast glass-mosaic-and-wood wall relief, Let me kindly introduce myself. They call me
MC Prince Brighton, by the Chicago sculptor and performance artist Nick Cave—one of four site-specific works commissioned for the building.

As you proceed into the museum, your attention is drawn downward by the busily patterned terrazzo flooring used for public circulation areas—a nougat-like amalgam of off-white aggregate set in a brown matrix—and upward to the unusually heavy wooden ceiling beams, which impart an oppressive sense of compression, even in the eighteen-foot-high main galleries. Especially unfortunate are the uppermost reaches of the Grand Hall, a salon that occupies the ground floor of one of the nine pavilions and can be used as a lounge or for lectures, recitals, and receptions. The top third of this foursquare, triple-height space is defined by a quartet of large stone-aggregate rectangles that protrude outward and hover overhead like Brutalist guillotine blades. This severe cruciform arrangement will put some people in mind of Louis Kahn, but his quest for monumentality in public architecture never resulted in such a menacing configuration. Close by, a broad, gracefully proportioned stairway leads up in two switchback flights to the second floor, where the galleries are illuminated by skylights supplemented with artificial lighting, a combination that helps the building succeed at its main task—to make the objects on view, chosen from among the 117,000 in the collection, look wonderful.

The dazzling selection in “Princeton Collects,” the principal inaugural show, was loosely organized by region and period, from which there were many departures to emphasize instructive affinities, befitting PUAM’s primary purpose as an educational institution. There were thought-provoking juxtapositions throughout the museum, such as Charles Willson Peale’s dashing full-length portrait George Washington at the Battle of Princeton (commissioned by the school in 1783, six years after the event), flanked by the Mohawk artist Alan Michelson’s 2024 bust of the first president. Its title, Hanödaga:yas (“town destroyer” in the Seneca tribal language), refers to the scorched-earth policy Washington pursued against Iroquois settlements during the Revolutionary War. Political statement though this may be, Michelson’s shiny silver simulacrum of a bust by Houdon is also reminiscent of Jeff Koons’s 1986 Luxury and Degradation series of kitsch objects that were similarly plated in stainless steel, including a preposterously bewigged bust of Louis XIV.

Other pairings made more purely art historical points. Andy Warhol’s luminous Blue Marilyn (1962; a gift of MoMA’s founding director, Alfred H. Barr Jr., Princeton ’22) is hung catercorner from a fourteenth-century gold-ground Florentine Madonna and Child, a reminder that the Byzantine Catholic devotional icons the young Warhol saw in his Pittsburgh church inspired his portraits of the Hollywood celebrities he revered as contemporary deities. And as for pedagogical devices, it would be hard to improve on the long stretches of double-fronted, four-tiered vitrines on the top story of the Great Hall pavilion. These brightly lit showcases are crammed with objects—Greek vases, pre-Columbian figurines, Chinese snuff bottles—to encourage close comparison and connoisseurship, much like the open shelves of decorative objects at Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s V&A East Storehouse, which opened in London last year.

The new PUAM is already a magnet for a regional art-loving public that more easily gravitates to Princeton than to New York or Philadelphia. Yet in the end Adjaye’s decorous scheme feels stodgy, conventional, and dull, and one can’t help wondering what a more conceptually audacious firm such as DS+R or Herzog & de Meuron might have proposed instead.

That’s not at all the case with Adjaye’s vigorous new Studio Museum in Harlem, which last November opened its first purpose-built headquarters since it was founded during the annus horribilis 1968 in a rented loft space on upper Fifth Avenue. In 1982 the growing operation—part archive, part incubator of Black artists, part community outreach organization—moved to larger premises on the site that it still occupies midblock on 125th Street. Here Adjaye’s neo-Brutalist approach is far more effective than on the sylvan Princeton campus. Although much of Harlem has been gentrified beyond the recognition of longtime residents, this low-grade commercial stretch remains recalcitrantly scuzzy. The setting is further blighted by the Studio Museum’s towering neighbor to the north: the Adam Clayton Powell Jr. State Office Building of l967–1973 by the African American architectural firm Ifill Johnson Hanchard, a nineteen-story International Style/Brutalist mash-up that looks both cut-rate and standoffish.

The Studio Museum needed to be architecturally assertive to make its presence felt on this clamorous thoroughfare, and Adjaye’s dynamic façade cuts through the visual chaos with bracing authority. It is an irregular seven-level stack of variously scaled rectangular boxes with large expanses of glass framed by thick concrete surrounds. This staccato arrangement—more animated than a Mondrian, to which it’s been likened—recalls a jazzier high-rise version of I.M. Pei’s Des Moines Art Center addition of 1966–1968, a gem from his early and underappreciated Brutalist phase.

The Studio Museum’s soaring entry hall, nearly three stories high, is dominated by the monumental grand stair. Made from dark and darker shades of gray terrazzo, this squared-off zigzagging column has a formal power akin to Tony Smith’s angled matte-black Minimalist sculptures of the 1960s and 1970s. But the grand stair also promises to be a people watchers’ paradise, with sight lines down from balconies that jut out toward the building’s glass façade and up from wooden bleacher seating at street level in the lobby below.

Considering that the site is only 134 feet wide (the equivalent of about seven New York City brownstones), the deployment of the galleries is ingenious, with little area wasted on circulation routes and levels cleverly juggled to maximize a perception of greater space. And as is the case at Princeton, art displays beautifully here. A handsome new guidebook, Meaning Matter Memory: Selections from the Studio Museum in Harlem Collection, shows why this is the foremost repository of modern Black art anywhere. Its concise, insightful entries on the life and work of more than 250 artists—from older masters like Alma Thomas, Jacob Lawrence, Romare Bearden, and Beauford Delaney, to current stars including Kerry James Marshall, Julie Mehretu, Mickalene Thomas, and Kara Walker, to a host of young contenders previously unknown to me—provide an up-to-date introduction to Black art. Generously illustrated and annotated, Meaning Matter Memory is also a tacit tribute to the Studio Museum’s much-admired director, Thelma Golden, who during the past two decades has consolidated its place among New York cultural treasures.

Two very different residential schemes by Adjaye in New York City are less praiseworthy. The Sugar Hill Mixed-Use Development of 2014 in Harlem—a thirteen-story, 124-unit residential-and-commercial hybrid managed by a local nonprofit organization—could be mistaken for a penal facility because of its somber dark gray concrete exterior (embedded with recycled glass to make it sparkle, as if that would help) and the tiny square windows on its narrow side elevations. Given the city’s affordable housing crisis, one must be thankful for small mercies, but none of the low-income and supported dwellings I’ve seen in recent years in the five boroughs turns such a cold shoulder to the surrounding community.

At the opposite end of Manhattan as well as the income scale is Adjaye’s 130 William Street condominium of 2017–2023. This sixty-six-story tower in the Financial District also has dark gray concrete cladding, hand-troweled to give the panels a rough texture, but here it is formed into arch-shaped window openings of two configurations, one more vertical and the other more horizontal. For some reason, arched fenestration never looks quite right on tall buildings, and 130 William Street is no exception. The building’s upwardly flaring profile harks back to the architect’s Smithsonian design, just as the arched windows refer to the Romanesque Revival styling of some of Lower Manhattan’s earliest high-rises.

Now that his trio of high-profile cultural projects has been completed, speculation is rife in architectural circles about whether Adjaye can regain his former eminence. Criminal charges have not been brought against him, but that might have more to do with the fact that in Ghana and South Africa, where the most serious alleged incidents took place, prosecutions for sexual assault are much less common than they are in the United States or Britain. And the lack of adjudication leaves unresolved the question of Adjaye’s guilt or innocence.

Today it is increasingly the case that various kinds of misdeeds, or more general misgivings about moral character, can end a career, even that of a highly talented artist. In architectural patronage, however, the human factor is even more important than in other art forms. It affects every step in the building design process, from the time a client hires an architect (I have witnessed several lose a potential job through some personal tic or social gaffe) to the “punch list” of unfinished desiderata before a patron signs the final check. Much of Adjaye’s work has come from cultural and educational institutions, and it could be difficult for him to win the approval of enlightened boards of trustees and private donors.

One can scarcely imagine the chagrin of Princeton administrators when they were blindsided by the Adjaye scandal and stuck with an incomplete project that had suddenly morphed into a public relations nightmare. The chilly reaction to the Financial Times story by PUAM’s astute director, Michael Steward—“Most of our work with Adjaye is behind us”—was wishful thinking when the museum’s opening was still two years away. Despite that spin, the building is irrevocably Adjaye’s, replete with a cautionary backstory that can serve a didactic purpose for Princeton students along with its magnificent artworks. But David Adjaye’s redemption appears most unlikely if he continues to portray himself as the victim of a plot to destroy him.