The Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced yesterday that British architect David Adjaye is to be the latest recipient of the prestigious Eugene McDermott Award in the Arts at MIT. The $100,000 prize also includes a valuable artist’s residency at the Institute in the spring of next year. Adjaye is set to take part in a series of public programs, panels, and symposia. Adjaye continues a long line of pioneering architects to have received the award including I.M. Pei (1984), Diller + Scofidio (1999), and Santiago Calatrava (2005).
Moscow School of Management, Moscow, Russia
“In my career, I have sought to cross creative platforms, to collaborate with artists and designers from different disciplines, and to focus on the creative discourse surrounding the act of making things,” said Adjaye upon receiving the award. “I believe it is this dialogue — the cultural intersection — that moves us forward, generates new possibilities, and creates greatness. The Eugene McDermott Award in the Arts at MIT has long stood for exactly this principle, and it [is] for this reason I am both supremely honored and supremely humbled to be named as this year’s recipient.”
Notable projects completed by Adjaye’s firm over the past decade include the Moscow School of Management, comprising a series of dramatic cantilevered volumes that hover above a cylindrical pedestal. In the United States, the studio completed the Denver Museum of Contemporary Art, a glazed box of light that stands as the nation’s first LEED-certified contemporary art museum.
© Ed Reeve
Back in his home city of London, Adjaye completed the Silverlightresidence in 2009, a gleaming aluminum volume that forms a striking, contemporary abstraction of the classic Victorian terrace. Notable current projects by the architect include the National Museum of African American History and Culture at the Smithsonian in Washington, set to open in 2016.
