Scandal and bloody-mindedness

Controversy unfolds differently in architecture than in the rest of the culture.

A stand-up comedian or painter accused of sexual misconduct might apologize, withdraw, see his commissions dry up or be canceled, and then, after a period of exile and reflection, genuine or otherwise, mark his return with a Netflix special or gallery show that consists of new work made in the shadow of, or even explicit atonement for, the earlier scandal.

In architecture, the slowest of the arts, not to mention the one most dependent on outside forces beyond its control—including, to name just a few, the performance of the S&P 500, the weather, the evolving mission statements of big philanthropies, the price of steel or plywood, the value of the dollar against the Euro or yen, and the shifting makeup of C-suites and boards of trustees—a controversy may instead appear in the middle of a long process of invention, gestation, and construction, which is to say after a building is designed but before it is complete. In a case like that, the final architectural product will not be a reflection, however sincere or opportunistic, of the scandal or its aftermath. It will instead speak to us of the time before, and of an architect’s state of mind at that earlier moment.

I give you this preamble as a delay tactic, really—a way of suggesting the complexity of the questions that face any writer considering the new Princeton University Art Museum, whose design team was led by the Ghanaian-British architect David Adjaye and which will open to the public on October 31. As I am the first critic (as far as I’m aware) to review the building—which I toured near the end of July with the museum’s longtime director, James Steward—I am leaping into something of an abyss, especially when it comes to thinking about how much time and energy to spend considering the relationship of Adjaye’s personal and professional behavior to the architecture of the museum. Can you blame me for narrating the jump and subsequent free fall in excessive (or obsessive) detail?

Adjaye, as many readers will know, is the founder of Adjaye Associates, with offices in London, Accra, and New York, and lead designer of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, public library branches in Washington D.C., stylish residential designs in London, and a clutch of other high-profile projects. He was still enjoying a meteoric rise in the summer of 2023 when an article appeared in the Financial Times reporting that three women, all former employees, had “accused him and his firm of different forms of exploitation—from alleged sexual assault and sexual harassment by him to a toxic work culture—that have gone unchecked for years.” Adjaye, 59, has denied the allegations.

The backlash was swift. Unlike Richard Meier, another prominent architect accused of #MeToo-era misconduct, who could simply slink off into an early retirement, Adjaye was moving into the prime of his career. Several clients quickly fired or parted ways with Adjaye’s firm, and it’s fair to assume that a lot of work that would soon have come his way never materialized.

There was a third category of projects that the FT report threw into limbo: buildings that were fully designed or even partially built when the article appeared. This was the case for his Studio Museum in Harlem, opening Nov. 15. It was also the case for the museum at Princeton, which (as Steward told the Art Newspaper) was “already 60% through construction when the scandal erupted.”

In those cases firing Adjaye wouldn’t have accomplished much beyond the merely symbolic. Instead the clients in question have distanced themselves from Adjaye himself while continuing officially to credit Adjaye Associates as design architects and, meanwhile, bumping up the profile of the executive architect, which for both Princeton and the Studio Museum was Cooper Robertson.

Have I waited long enough to get to an assessment of the Princeton building? It is an unusually powerful and accomplished work of architecture: without doubt one the best American museum buildings of the last fifteen years, joining a group that includes SO-IL’s Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art at UC Davis (2016) and Allied Works’ Clyfford Still Museum in Denver (2011).

Part of what make it so strong is its willingness to go against the grain of recent university architecture in the U.S., which has been overwhelmingly cautious of late. This caution has tended to take one of three forms: earnest and well-appointed revivalism, as in Robert A.M. Stern’s neo-neo-Gothic residential colleges for Yale; over-scaled pragmatism, as in a flotilla of newish lab buildings; or coolly rational if largely defanged neo-modernism. The Princeton museum instead looks for inspiration to the wave of Brutalist buildings that emerged in the 1950s, in work by Le Corbusier and Alison and Peter Smithson, and crested in the early 1970s in a final group of buildings, many of them for university clients, by Marcel Breuer, Mario Ciampi, Paul Rudolph, and a handful of others.

These buildings were muscular, brash, uncompromising, and divisive, marked above all by what Reyner Banham labeled “bloody-mindedness.” Most American colleges, including Princeton, have spent a full half-century making up for the perceived damage they wrought by commissioning a long list of better-behaved, and very often less compelling, works of architecture in the intervening years.

Adjaye’s design, in the heart of the Princeton campus, owes a particular debt to Le Corbusier’s National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo, which opened in 1959. Like that building, the Princeton museum is a broad-shouldered, mostly horizontal composition wrapped in a combination of exposed concrete and stone-aggregate panels. Made up of nine interlocking pavilions, it replaces an older collection of museum buildings on the same site, the last wing of which was an International Style design, from 1966, by the New York firm Steinmann and Cain. Adjaye and Cooper Robertson mitigate the bulk of the new building by sinking it slightly, so that visitors from the north and west approach it by taking a few steps down. The architects have also done their best to make it feel like a crossroads on campus, threading two “artwalks” through the museum as extensions of existing pedestrian axes.

Neither gesture, thankfully, is able to detract from the singular power of the design. At 146,000 square feet over three floors, this is not a small building—and doesn’t pretend to be. (It is roughly five times the size of the Manetti Shrem Museum, for example, even though UC Davis has 32,000 undergraduates to Princeton’s 5,800.) Extensive cantilevers at the corners, beneath pleated and windowless gallery volumes, add to the sense of mass and weight, especially if you are walking beneath them to reach one of the entrances. The museum encloses the existing Marquand Library of Art and Archeology (closed until early next year) inside exterior walls matching the rest of the new building. Elsewhere it features rectangular and porthole-like circular windows.

Once you pass through the doors, the interior of the museum seems to explode upward. There is a bravura space just past the information desk where the main stair takes your eye up and through a central atrium, around which the main galleries on the second floor are wrapped in a roughly circular pattern; here smooth terrazzo floors are paired with craggy concrete walls. (A restaurant with an extensive terrace and staff offices occupy the third floor.) I was equally taken with another ground-floor space, the Grand Hall, with its cruciform glulam-beam ceiling and, peeking down from the second level, mitered corner windows.

The galleries themselves offer a handsome and hushed counterpart, without resorting to mere prettiness, to the muscularity of the museum’s exterior and ground-floor spaces. Here concrete and stone recede in favor of polished hardwood floors and more glulam beams, with some of the art on movable partitions that stop just short of the ceiling and exquisite casework by Studio Joseph, which also worked on the gallery layouts. The gallery walls are painted a wide range of colors, from white to sage green to a deep (almost navy) blue. Corner pavilions offer a mix of natural light—filtered carefully through fabric panels—and artificial light. Overall the museum’s remarkably wide-ranging collection, which is especially strong in Asian art, is shown to excellent effect. One significant misstep is the expedient acoustical ceiling paneling that runs overhead in some of the circulation spaces.

On the whole the museum’s architecture offers a winning (and unusual) mixture of deftness and brawn. Credit for this, beyond the design team, goes to Princeton’s highly regarded campus architect, Ron McCoy, and to Steward, the museum’s director, who knows the building arguably better than anyone. Steward’s earlier stops include the University of Michigan, where he helped shepherd a new museum building by Allied Works that opened in 2009, and U.C. Berkeley, where he worked inside Ciampi’s masterful if never beloved (except by me!) Brutalist museum from 1970. If you squint a little you might imagine that the Princeton Art Museum is the love child of those two projects, combining Ciampi’s pinwheel of concrete beams and insistent interior focus with Allied Works’ careful mix of glazed and opaque spaces.

And yet the Adjaye building manages to transcend revivalism and emerge as an entirely contemporary work of architecture. It seems especially timely in its apparent readiness to march headlong, armored and toughened up, into the new culture wars (which by the way have already seen the Princeton president, Christopher Eisgruber, show more mettle than certain of his Ivy League peers).

God knows we could all use more bloody-mindedness at the moment, and to see more of it from the leaders of our most prominent cultural, legal, and educational institutions.

As to the question of Adjaye and the accusations against him, I’m afraid I don’t have any brilliant suggestions about how to proceed. I don’t think it’s appropriate, as you’ll have guessed, to ignore the charges. Nor does it seem fair to sidestep the architectural substance of projects like the Princeton museum, which has already changed the character of the university’s central campus in a fundamental way.

So read or re-read the FT article and Adjaye’s responses. Visit the Princeton building for yourself, and the Studio Museum, once they open. Weigh Steward’s comment, when asked recently by the Art Newspaper about Adjaye, that “a flawed human being can make beautiful work.” My best recommendation—my only one, really—is simply to consider it all.

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