David Adjaye bounces back

Design Miami – the design show which runs concurrently with Art Basel’s annual sunshine sortie to the Floridian city at the beginning of every December – upped its ante last year when it moved from the Design District to a specially erected tent right next to the Convention Centre housing the art fair. It also had the advantage of a spectacular installation of suspended chairs at its entrance, by German designer Konstantin Grcic, who’d been nominated Designer of the Year for the event. 

This year, an equally thoughtful project by architect David Adjaye, Design Miami’s Designer of the Year for 2011, will have pride of place outside the tent. Adjaye’s proposal is for a small temporary building created of timber struts that visitors will pass through on their way in and out of the fair. Its unique “compressed” composition means a window, doorways and seating are all incorporated into one continuous piece, showing how opportunities like these allow designers to create experimental pieces, trialing ideas that they may be able to use more widely in the future. 

David Adjaye

Adjaye, born in Dar-es-Salaam and educated in the UK, had a brush with bankruptcy in 2009 and had to downsize his business. Since then, successful projects including the Moscow School of Management which opened early this year and an extreme interior refit at the Upper East Side home of entrepreneur and art collector Adam Lindemann in New York have helped him regain some of the ground lost.  The Miami project may be small by his considerations, but promises to be perfectly formed.

Adjaye Associates, Moscow School of Management, Skolkovo