Architectural Record: You’ve done a New York townhouse for a billionaire art collector, an experimental dwelling without a budget in China, and a number of small pavilions. A common thread in all of them is a love for discarded or unpopular materials like oil-soaked travertine, tulipwood, and rejected slate. Why is that?
David Adjaye: We live in a time where material resources are becoming scarcer. In industries that really use materials expensively—and architecture is one of the big consumers of material on the planet—we need to look at what we think is valuable and not valuable and to question those judgments, which have become patterns that we’ve inherited. I’m interested in finding new materials that can create new value systems, new appreciations. That’s something I look for in my work all the time.
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