 Welcome to an insight and an idea with Ghanaian, British, international acclaimed architect, Sir David Ajay. And just to give you a little history. So, so David, I'm going to come forward with a couple of the accolades that you've received over your career. If I was to speak of all of them, sir, we would be talking for the whole half an hour. But just some of the highlights. Obviously, in 2000, you started Ajay Associates, and you have studios in London, in New York, and in Ghana. And the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC, which opened in 2016, is seen as one of your standout projects. As I said earlier, there are many of those standout projects. But it was the New York Times that said, effectively, this was the cultural event of the year when you launched in 2016. You've made the list of 100 most influential people by Time Magazine. That was in 2017. And in 2021, Reba Royal Gold Medal, which is the highest award for architecture in Britain, in British architecture. So, of course, again, we also need to mention winner of the Crystal Awards, which is a key highlight in the Davos agenda. And we're going to chat and jump right into the influence that you've created in architecture, negotiating many different cultures, a multiplicity of cultures. And perhaps we can start with one of your projects in Abu Dhabi at the moment, and that, of course, being the Abrahamic family house, which is an interfaith complex. David, so, David, let me get you to come in here. Thank you. Thank you very much. Bramwin, yes. The Abrahamic is a really special project that really takes on this unique, you know, the trinity of this Abrahamic faith that is influencing over half the world's population and to talk about the commonality of the three faiths rather than differences. You know, in a way, when I looked at the history of the architecture, it has represented these three different faiths. I realized that architecture had also been complicit in the description of the differences of these religions. I think this new initiative by the head imam, the pope, and the head rabbi of the region to really talk about the commonality and to commission the royal family of Abu Dhabi to commission this incredible project to make a statement about the commonality, I think it's a very profound moment. And, you know, I won the competition because I really sought to not dissolve the qualities of each of the religions, but to find an architectural device that would start to unify them and to talk about, to use architecture and narrative storytelling and architecture as a way to unify the different ways in which the faith look at their relationship to divinity and to the world and to each other. Very exciting. So let's talk about examples of segregation. And of course, you've got those heavy examples, the apartheid here in South Africa, well-known redlining in the U.S. And the question really is whether you see cities at the moment as reinforcing that separation or segregation and how architecture can be used to change the game in the 21st century. It's a very sensitive subject. And I think that what we are finding is that cities, when they're not careful, start to create inequalities and start to not realize that we are all interconnected. I think what is very clear, and we're all realizing this, especially in the world that we now live in, is that we can't make cities with extreme hierarchies. We need to democratize the value that we bring in design to every part of the city because essentially if we give that equality to the city, all citizens perform and the city shines. It makes for better cities in the end. So really the question, I know that there are choices, but the question about the distribution of architecture and design to really target quality in every sector, not just waiting for the grand commissions is such an important lesson for city makers to realize. And to look at the sprinkling of talent and of opportunity all over the city to create equivalence as much as possible. The city should seem as to the citizens that it's continually growing equally. That something happens here, but something happens here. It doesn't just always happen in one area where there's wealth, but it happens also in the poor areas. It happens in the areas that need new infrastructure. It happens where there's new innovation. And these are some of the issues that I think as architects we're very sensitive about. I mean, in my work, I choose work very specifically to make sure that we are not sort of over sort of driving agendas which talk about exclusivity, but ones that talk about inclusivity. It doesn't mean we don't do work that's about luxury, but we always measure that within the context of the city and how it's evolving. And we feel that that's very, very important. Now, Africa, African renaissance is incredibly important as an underpin to your work as you've highlighted. And there's a specific project where you redrew the map of Africa, topographically, similar communities, eliminating political boundaries in the current environment. This is important and the message really rings loud and clear. I mean, you look at Africa, we have officially launched the Africa Free Trade Continental Area that went live on the 2021 January, the 1st. So this speaks beautifully to that theme. Give us a little more insight. You know, from about 2000, when I started my practice to about 2011, I sought to go to every single African country. And I've been to every single country on the continent. I visited the capitals in the second cities and their sort of countryside to really get a sense of the built environment of the continent and to not just use my sense of a few countries as a way to speak for the continent. I really wanted to know. So that documentation led me to really understand that there were incredible connections amongst what were these artificial structures, laws, which were the national boundaries. And that actually communities lived across from borders that were relational for centuries. And these have been divided, as we know through the sort of history of the continent. And I wanted to then go back in talking specifically about the built environment and about geography and climate to talk about the things that unify us as Africans rather than the things that make us different again. So it became very clear that the unifying elements were our geographies and the cultures that evolved in those geographies. For instance, in the Sahel, very specific geographies in the forest, very specific geographies. In the desert, very specific geographies. And in the mountains, even though there's mountains in the Southwest and there's mountains in the Northeast, they sort of have very similar high altitude cultures, which I thought was very extraordinary. So for me, it became very clear that one could talk about the continent in terms of its geographies rather than its national boundaries. And in a way, when you look at what's happening in West Africa now, that free trade umbrella sort of hugs the desert, Sahel, Savannah and forest culture in a wonderful crucible and starts to kind of allow those cultures to intermingle. And I think that for me, that's the future map of the continent is the shifting geographies. And one which also is paying attention to climate and how climate is also affecting those geographies. I think that is a kind of much more live map than the static construction in the mind of national boundaries. How much is the desert eating the forest? How much forest do we have left? These are really pertinent questions that national groups and continents should be kind of concerned about and should be visualizing continually. Let's just jump on that idea about climate change, the importance of reducing carbon footprint. And I know that this is the center at the center of your projects. And it is very important, given that the World Economic Forum recently put out their risk report and climate change is at the top of that risk collection. So perhaps just give a sense of how much of this is a driver when it comes to defining and planning your projects. I must say that since day one, since I started making the smallest pieces of furniture right through to the privilege of being able to work on very large symbolic projects for countries, I've always been concerned about an awareness of material use and our energy use on the climate of the planet and its effect on the climate. The work has sought to always find strategic ways to be resourceful, but to be generous to communities. That's what my entire agenda about. And now sort of coming in this last sort of few years, being able to now work more specifically on the continent, I've been able to even focus much more on what are the kind of radical things that the continent can be doing that are not about huge costs. When you're in Europe or in continental America, you're thinking about technologies a lot when you're trying to think about climate reduction. But actually on the continent, we have incredible precedent of birth architecture, of incredible sort of community urban systems that we need to re-remember and one of the projects that I'm very excited about that I'm working with President Tambo and Becky on is this presidential library in Johannesburg where we are prototyping a large institutional building which will be made out of rammed earth, sort of looking at that agrarian architecture of rammed earth, which was a wonderful technology of our ancestors and looking at how that can be a fantastic model for a new kind of architecture. And this is going to be built in Riviera right in the middle of Johannesburg. I listened into your interview on Radio Davos where you spoke about the presidential, Tambo and Becky presidential library and of course being from Johannesburg, broadcasting from Johannesburg now, you took the words right out of my mouth when you came to this project and just elaborate on the grain element, the connectivity of earth because as I understand it, you're going to be looking at eight almost large grain silos in the design given the connectivity that that has across the African continent and the symbolism of grain as a unifier. Yeah, so in trying to look for architectural typologies, things that sort of have made sense over the centuries that the civilizations have produced, when thinking about this presidential library, I went straight to the idea of grain storage and grain storage being a narrative or a story about the technologies of the ancient world. And if you think of the grain store as a kind of early piece of technology, it was something that allowed communities to survive, to feed their children, to teach about new techniques of agrarian sort of stewardship and allowed kind of longevity and civilizations to grow. And that's in a way what knowledge is about. It's about sustaining communities and allowing them to grow more focused on the right way of being in stewardship with the planet and to create fantastic communities that sort of support the development of our human species. So I became very fascinated by that and in presenting it to the president, he was excited about this idea of taking a piece of fragment of history and to bring it into the modern world and to use that as a device to think about 21st century African architecture and how that could work. For me, the metaphor of the grain silo, the humble grain silo in the village, now as an urban forum of knowledge and a container and repository of the archives of great African liberation movements and the work of this president seemed like a very powerful way to start to join these pieces of the histories of the continent. The Edom Museum of West African Art in Benin is another standout project. And you have described a lot of your work across the African continent and I come back again to that term African renaissance and as an underpin of the African renaissance. Can you basically give me a little bit more as to how you see your work driving the African renaissance? Well, I hope that what we know is that architecture is a very important tool in the arsenal of development of any nation or city or state. And I'm hoping that we are able to use design excellence and design thinking to really sharpen some of the critical points about cultural restitution, about the development of identities, specific identities about environmental stewardship in a very unique way for the continent by targeting very specific projects that really give examples as to ways forward that are not out of the realm of possibility for any nation to sort of look at and learn from and to use as best practice to kind of go further. The business of architecture is really about making precedent and making example. And what has happened with the lack of development on the continent is that we have very sort of small scale, what I call commercial development, but no innovative thinking about the topologies and the cultural infrastructure of our continent. And that is what drives innovation. That is what drives deep thinking that really changes the narrative about the built environment of the continent. And if we're not doing that and taking an African perspective on that, it'll be lost and we will make generic cities that will look like everywhere else. And I think that would be a tragedy. This continent is so unique and this continental plate needs a unique architecture to represent the kind of beauty that it already has. In the introduction, I mentioned the National Museum of African American History and Culture as being one of your most renowned projects. And again, just referring to the fact that it was seen as the cultural event of the year by the New York Times Magazine when it was launched in 2016. What an amazing project. I spent some time deep diving into the visuals of your projects. And I was fascinated by the use of what appears to be bronze. And you're going to correct me with the terminology because I may be one thing outside, but it's not. And it's all about the recycling of materials and materials that had a past life being reinvented because take me through it. It's actually aluminum. I'm going to wait for you to take me through the technicals. No, so we were fascinated. This was a 10-year project, nine years to really get it completed. And we were fascinated with the idea of making something that spoke to the great heritage of the Africans who went to the New World and became African Americans. And this idea of using a material that was very common in West Africa, bronze, and the incredible skill of bronze smelting to create the beautiful bronze works that we know specifically of Benin, et cetera. But to then talk about that skill in the Americas in the cast-iron architecture of the communities, we know that the slaves were the ones who were building those incredible things. So we wanted to talk about the excellence of labor, that slavery was not just about cotton picking, but it was about the excellence of a community to do engineering, to do craft work, to do metal work, to build houses. As well as to cultivate agriculture, that was the use of these Africans in developing the New World. And we wanted to talk about labor, this excellent skill of smelting metals and remaking form in the facade of the building. So it looks like bronze as a reference, but it's actually, we live in the 21st century, we didn't want to use new bronze. So we looked at recycling aluminium, one of the resources that's most common in our world. And to upcycle and recycle aluminium into this new form. So recycle aluminium is used. And then to use a 21st century polymer coating, which is basically a very sophisticated painting, paint job, but one that has a kind of metal quality to it that changes the perception of the material from aluminium to bronze. So from the outside, you feel and sense bronze. We sort of did a lot of work to make sure it absolutely looked like bronze as it was cast. And it will age and weather looking like bronze. But this is the kind of beauty of the 21st century. Another point that you made when you were describing the project was that the metal, the resulting metal is indestructible. It looks as though it comes from the time of the permits, but obviously it didn't. So it's also about that as a symbolism. And perhaps that indestructible element, if we focus on that for a moment and how that relates to the current political situation, recent political situation in the United States. Can you offer me a thought there? But I think that what's what, you know, for me in my work, I love a sense of timelessness in the architecture that I produce. That you know it's the 21st century when you analyse it, but it has a quality that connects to our humanity and our sense of the built environment. What was beautiful was having this building on the mall, even when all these things were happening from the incredible protests that were having the peaceful protests and even the violent protests, but somehow this building was part of that context. And I think that it showed very clearly why architecture is important, reminding people of the diversity and the humanity of our people as the kind of context to a frame. So it's sort of, I think that building in the context of the mall really spoke to the diversity and the multiplicity and the reality of what America really is rather than a fiction that might be reinforced because the architecture might kind of contribute to a sense of a singularity. And I was very proud to see, you know, the women's march sort of standing in front of it, the Black Lives Matter march, standing in front of the building and using it as an important touchstone to talk about their visibility in the world. And that is what we're really talking about, that we have visibility in the world for all citizens to be on this journey that we're all creating core civilization. So David, I think it's an appropriate point to take a question that's just come through from our audience. And that is on the visibility of all people in the world. So I'm just going to read directly from the question here. And it's for years, people with disabilities have been asking for more accessible infrastructure. As a strong advocate and practitioner, what advice would you have for us, especially in convincing authorities in developing countries where this is not a priority? How do we make it everyone's business? It's so critical. And this question touches my heart because I grew up with my youngest brother is disabled. I grew up with disability my entire life. And a sort of undercurrent of my work is accessibility for all people. And it did stem from having a direct experience of disability my whole life. And I just, in my work, I know that in developing worlds, there are sort of the rules are not as tight. I think in the developed world, it's almost impossible now to make architecture without accessibility. But in the developing world, it's something that we have to insist on. Something that I'm doing in a cry and all the work that I'm doing is insisting that all this infrastructure we're building has accessibility for the most able and disabled part of people in our communities. So the architecture cannot be detrimental to their mobility and their access to the facilities that are being made. And I think that we just all have to champion this in all our corners. And they will listen. In the municipalities of Accra, there has been no resistance. And there's a sense of thank God, somebody wants to do this and let's do it. It does cost a bit more, but it's worth it. And it's a take up. And when people see that it's not that complicated to make buildings accessible, there's a kind of copying of the effect which is important. When we make buildings which are not sensitive like that and we told them up as great models, that's the mistakes we make. We need to point them out when we see them and to talk about how they separate our communities and how we don't want that. So I'm really very sensitive to that question. And perhaps that brings us appropriately to the Cherry Gross Memorial in South London. For those who don't know, Cherry Gross was an innocent black woman who was shot by police in her home by the London Metropolitan Police in her home in front of her children and paralyzed and lived having to be supported by her family for many, many years until she died in 2011. So give me a sense of your work when it comes to memorials such as the Cherry Gross Memorial. Cherry Gross is a really dear project for me because it really was at a time when I was in full practice and the story was so shocking in London. It was a rear and a tailor of England, but thankfully she survived but with a tragically reduced quality of life. But I wanted very much to work on a memory that not only are we talking about heroic memories, but the memories of the everyday of the things that actually affect people in communities and transform their shape and turn their lives, sometimes in disbelief against the systems that they live in. And I think we underestimate the power of memorials in our environments to help people heal and realize what needs to happen. So when I was asked by the family and the foundation to look at this, I was so thrilled, I'm doing it for free. I said, there's no way I'm charging for this. This is something that I think is super family important, but I wanted to do it. And I wanted, you know, we spoke to Britston Council and we found a very prime location in Windrush Square, which is one of the prime sort of squares in the community and one where this monument will be hopefully unveiled this spring and, you know, we'll finally sort of not create closure but create a sense of acknowledgement in the public realm of these tragedies. But I think it helps with healing and it tells the story for future generations. It doesn't just exist in that cupboard somewhere and we're not just celebrating the great and the good but we're also celebrating the ordinary heroes that affect our lives. That is part of work that I've been very interested in in memorials. We're working also on a proposal for the Holocaust Memorial next to the House of Parliament that we hope we will be able to build something that should have happened in Britain since the war but hasn't happened and we're thrilled to be leading that. It's not just going to be a memorial but it's also going to be a learning centre that really speaks to, especially on this day, the Holocaust Memorial Day, speaks to the lessons of never forgetting but also learning and creating infrastructure for younger generations to have the tools to be able to understand what fascism means and what it can do and how we want a better world for all of us to live in where there's humanity and justice. There's another project I want to highlight and that is your work for the largest healthcare union in New York itself, the headquarters. And it's the 1199 SEIU. I may have got the acronym completely wrong. But you were commissioned here to do the public spaces and really to transform the environment for new people coming into the building. Talk to me about that project. And I think just before we do that, the fact that we're talking about projects all over the world is testimony to your global projects and the fact that, again, you are acclaimed on a worldwide scale and have operated in so many different territories, so New York and the largest healthcare union. Thank you so much. I was really, when I ran up about this healthcare union, especially in the time that we're in, we got the project before the pandemic, but just as somebody who supports instead of essential workers, hugely, I was thrilled. And the first thing I wanted to do was to really look at their incredible history, their roots in that beginning. And when I sort of looked through their roots and their history, I was touched. I realized that here is the sort of the stories that were being discussed and are in museums, great and the good, King, right through to Obama have sort of been sort of part of this union and part of the uplifting of this union. They celebrate Frederick Douglass, et cetera. So all these incredible touchstones. And I felt that to kind of give the public world of that union, it could have just been a wonderfully designed space with plasterboard walls and a few picture frames and paintings, et cetera. But to turn it into a sort of monument to their history, I sort of used ceramic muraling to glaze the entire walls of their public area with their entire history. So as you move through the three floors of this public area, you are looking at the unfolding of their history from that first building. We brought artifacts from the building that they left, which was their original building into this new building. We recreated murals from their original buildings in the new building. And we talked about the history that's unfolded. And what's been really wonderful is to see how people have been shocked and how profound this union has been in American sort of work of health workers' lives and trying to transform the quality of their lives and the fights that have been had. Because the younger generation, we assume know these things, but they actually don't. And they don't see these things. They don't see what their parents saw. And in a way, just having this spatialized what I call sort of history has kind of reinvigorated a sense of this incredible trajectory that they have. And I hope it gives them, for new generations, a sense that they can also be part of this great story and be part of this very essential thing that we need in our cities and in our lives. So I did this project. It's a small project. We work at very large scale and very small scale. I did this project because I just loved the union and I was just committed to how important they are in terms of what they do for us in our lives. You referenced new generation. And given that we have an insight and idea as our overarching theme for this discussion, what is it that you want to leave aspiring architects, young architects graduating architects with from an insight perspective over, and perhaps here taking those points of experience that you know are going to drive your legacy in that very young population. And here I refer to the African continent having such a young population. You could transform many into architects. The advice that you would leave them with. I think that we live in an extraordinary time. Every sort of, I think during every sort of century that we all sort of evolve into, there are moments. And I think that we are at that precipice moment again, where not only our way of life, but also the kind of architecture that we make has to respond and change. And I think that that's a great moment for young professionals to really enter this profession, which is so needed, and to have as much diversity in this profession because it can't be made by one type of person. It has to be made by all of us to represent all of us and to create an architecture that really responds to the critical issues of the time, the nature of how cities are made and how they're going to evolve our relationship to the planet, the stewardship of the planet and the resources and material and energy and the representation of our diversity in our cultures and the diversity of the continents. I think this gives an incredible platform for anybody who has a desire to contribute in the built environment to join this moment. It really is an incredible moment. I think in history we'll look back at this moment as a kind of moment that a generation hopefully stood up and changed the world and made it better. And I think that architecture is part of that polyphony of professionals that can contribute to that. And I think that any young architect right now should be very excited about coming into the world to contribute to that. And if they're working for people who are not excited by this, they should push it or they should make this agenda happen, they should start their own practices and go out there and change the world. It's absolutely a world that's waiting to be changed to be made better. So, David, we've got one minute left and architecture is long-term in nature. The next 10 years for you, what are some of the key projects that we can look forward to? I'm completing the Abrahamic Centre in Abu Dhabi. I'm working on the National Cathedral in Ghana. Hopefully we'll be completing Holocaust Memorial in London. We'll be completing the Studio Museum in Harlem, very important arts centre and also a new museum in Princeton. It's a very exciting decade for me and I look forward to sharing with the world the things that we're doing all over the world. I thank you for this opportunity, this platform, and I'm so grateful and shocked and humbled by the award that I was given. This Crystal Award means a lot to me. It's my first humanitarian award, so it means a lot and I thank you very much. Well, again, congratulations on the Crystal Award and it's been an absolute privilege chatting to you. Thank you very much. So, David Ajay, OVE.