David Adjaye, the architect, usually makes buildings for people to live in and to use. That’s what an architect does. Recently, though, he dropped by the Gagosian gallery on Twenty-fourth Street to visit a new structure of his that serves no practical purpose, otherwise known as an art work: a labyrinthine citadel called “Asaase,” a Twi word that means “earth.” The curator Antwaun Sargent had commissioned the piece for “Social Works,” a group show for which he asked a dozen Black artists to engage with social space “as a community-building tool.” Adjaye’s “Asaase” is made from blocks of rammed earth, a technique dating to the Neolithic period. Take some dirt—in this case, sixty tons’ worth, from a limestone quarry outside Albany—add water and a soupçon of cement, pound vigorously, and voilà. After months spent contemplating the project, Adjaye described the experience of encountering the finished work as “insane.”
Adjaye, dressed in loose layers of black, like a ninja in leather slip-ons, meditated on the relationship between humans and geology. “It’s another creature,” he said, of mud. He discussed oxidation, ionization, the properties of local stone. Once, while building a house on Park Avenue and Seventy-seventh Street, he hit Manhattan’s famous schist. In the gallery, his silky British voice was at risk of being drowned out by the dentist-drill ambiance of nearby installation work. Crushed earth, like that used to make “Asaase,” soaks up carbon dioxide, purifying the air. “Apparently, that’s why ancient cultures survived for so long,” Adjaye said. He swiped his palm along a fine layer of silt that had settled on the sculpture’s outer wall. “The mud became a way of protecting these communities, because it was more than just an enclosure,” he went on. “It was a kind of defense.”
Adjaye entered “Asaase” through a sloping passageway and meandered down one of its curving corridors. The work begins low to the ground, but its walls swiftly rise to suggest a fortified city, or a temple. “This moment can really be very magical,” he said, as he reached the inner sanctum. He leaned back to contemplate a looming column that serves as a focal point. Seen from the outside, it looks solid, but Adjaye had decided to hollow it out, so visitors are confronted with the surprise of emptiness—a trick.
A hair dryer lay across Adjaye’s path. Also a moment, if a less magical one. A gallery technician in white overalls materialized to warn Adjaye, in a German accent, not to trip on the cord. She had been painting the concrete ground. Moving away, he murmured, “We put a little pad down not to destroy Larry’s floor.”
Adjaye was born in 1966 in Tanzania, to Ghanaian parents; his father, who served as a diplomat for the newly independent Ghana, took the family from country to country, eventually settling in England. As an adult, Adjaye has kept up the habit of travel. “I’m terrified of being bored,” he said. He likes to immerse himself in the places where he works. In 2010, when, together with the architect J. Max Bond, Jr., he was leading the design team for the National Museum of African American History and Culture, in Washington, D.C., he moved to New York, an Amtrak ride away. A few years ago, he was chosen to design Ghana’s National Cathedral, in Accra. “It’s the country of my ancestors, but it’s still developing,” he said. “It’s not, like, going to be your metropolitan city. I talked to my wife, and we were, like, ‘We should just go.’ ”
The couple arrived in Accra, with their two young children, in 2019, and soon found themselves grounded by the pandemic. Adjaye owns land in the village where his father grew up, and the family began to spend weekends there. “It’s a converted Methodist, Presbyterian, animist, Muslim community,” he explained. “My father actually comes from the head family, but he sort of ran away. In a weird way, I’ve come back.” The village, with its low-slung buildings, partly inspired Adjaye to work with rammed earth. He is using the same method to build a house of his own there, the first that he has ever built for himself. Thus far, he has managed to keep his identity, both as an internationally renowned architect and as a town scion, a secret. “It’s very lo-fi,” he said. “At first my kids were, like, ‘What the hell are we doing here?’ Now they’re obsessed.”
He walked behind his sculpture, pausing to peer through a crack that had formed in one of its blocks. Some of the earth had crumbled during the truck trip to the gallery. “At first I freaked out,” he said. He has since made his peace with his structure’s flaws: “If it were too perfect, I think it would look too fake.” He intended, he said, for “Asaase” to offer a “fictional anthropology” for an imagined civilization, rooted in African custom and mindful of the planet. “A kind of primitive, future sustainability,” he added—earth, for the good of Earth. ♦
