The Art Institute of Chicago has announced the installation of a thought provoking mid-career survey of work by critically acclaimed architect David Adjaye, opening September 19, 2015 and running until January 3, 2016 in the only North American venue for this globally focused exhibition. Making Place: The Architecture of David Adjaye explores the architect’s transformation of complex ideas into approachable and innovative structures that respond to local and global systems of culture, economics, and technology. Born in Tanzania in 1966 and raised in Ghana, the Middle East, and England, Adjaye works from offices in London, New York, Berlin and Accra. With projects worldwide, his practice defies cultural categories and geopolitical borders.
The exhibition — comprising furniture, housing, public buildings and master plans — fills the first-floor Abbott Galleries and the second-floor Architecture and Design galleries in the Art Institute’s Modern Wing with drawings, sketches, models and building mock-ups. A specially commissioned film featuring Adjaye’s collaborators, an international roster of influential art world figures, brings his projects alive and makes clear the important role that Adjaye plays in contemporary architecture today. In a special collaboration with the Art Institute, David Adjaye will also provide personal commentary on select works of African Art from the permanent collection, shared with visitors through new object labels that reflect his interests and inspirations.
Making Place: The Architecture of David Adjaye is accompanied by a richly illustrated catalogue with in-depth essays by David Adjaye, Zoë Ryan, Okwui Enwezor, Peter Allison, Andrea Phillips, and Mabel O. Wilson. Titled David Adjaye: Form, Heft, Material, and underwritten through the generosity of Nancy Carrington Crown and A. Steven Crown, the catalog is published by the Art Institute and Haus der Kunst and distributed worldwide by Yale University Press.
For more information, please visit http://www.artic.edu/exhibition/david-adjaye.