“What could a museum be for the repatriation of objects?” the architect asked at the March Meeting in Sharjah. “What would a museum mean in [Benin]… an extraordinary city with a thousand-year history destroyed in the nineteenth century?” Adjaye is designing the Edo Museum of West African Art, set to open in 2025, as a final rebuke to institutions in the old colonial powers who refuse to hand back looted objects. His words are testament to a design practice that moves beyond merely providing vessels in which others programme, to a far more in-depth approach to museum building. It’s apparent too in the new home he is creating for the storied Studio Museum in Harlem, having honed his understanding of the needs of an institution dedicated to Black thinking and experience not least during the 2016 build of his National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC. Meanwhile, in the UK, Adjaye Associates worked with Theaster Gates to realise the artist’s Serpentine Pavilion, Black Chapel.
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