ART
ARCHITECTURE
& HISTORY
in the Public Realm
Cocktails & Conversations


March 27, 2015 Center for Architecture, New York City

The Pairing:
David Adjaye, Adjaye Associates
Thomas Campbell, Metropolitan Museum of Art

Cocktail designed by:
Toby Cecchini, Bartender + Author





David Adjaye, OBE, Founder and Primary Architect, Adjaye Associates
David Adjaye, David Adjaye is recognized as a leading architect of his generation, was born in Tanzania to Ghanaian parents. His influences range from contemporary art, music and science to African art forms and the civic life of cities. Since his office’s start in 1994, his ingenious use of materials and sculptural ability established him as an architect with an artist’s sensibility and has led him to win numerous prestigious commissions. In Oslo the Nobel Peace Centre is inserted into the shell of a disused railway station. In London the Whitechapel Idea Store pioneered a new approach to provide information services. Adjaye Associates’ largest completed project to date is the £160 million Moscow School of Management Skolkovo. Adjaye was also the designer for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver and two public libraries in Washington, DC. In 2009 his team was selected to design the new $360M Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture on Washington’s National Mall. His office has also recently completed a social housing project in NYC’s Sugar Hill area, the Center for Art and Culture at Colgate University (ongoing), the Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African & African American Art at Harvard’s Hutchins Center and a condominium development for Four Seasons in Washington, DC (ongoing).

Adjaye Associates offices in London, Berlin, New York, Accra, and Shanghai have projects world-wide, including a shopping and cultural complex in Beirut (ongoing), a concept store in Lagos, a HQ building for the International Finance Corporation in Dakar (ongoing), and a children’s pediatric cancer center in Kigali, Rwanda (ongoing). Adjaye frequently collaborates with contemporary artists, including Chris Ofili, Olafur Eliasson, and Okwui Enwezor.

Adjaye has taught at the Royal College of Art, where he had previously studied, and at the Architectural Association School in London, and has held distinguished professorships at the University of Pennsylvania, Yale, and Princeton. He is currently the John C. Portman Design Critic in Architecture at Harvard. He was awarded the OBE for services to architecture in 2007, received the Design Miami/Year of the Artist title in 2011, the Wall Street Journal Innovator Award in 2013 and Harvard’s W.E.B Du Bois Medal in 2014. He is an Academician in the National Academy of Design.

Adjaye’s ten-year study of the capital cities of Africa was shown in Urban Africa, an exhibition at the Design Museum, London and published as African Metropolitan Architecture in NYC and as Adjaye Africa Architecture in London. He was the artistic director of GEO-graphics: A map of art practices in Africa, past and present, a major exhibition at the Centre for Fine Arts, Brussels. An exhibition of his architectural work, David Adjaye: Output, was held at Gallery MA, Tokyo in 2010. He is now collaborating with Haus der Kunst in Munich and the Art Institute of Chicago on a comprehensive retrospective exhibition to open in 2015.

Thomas P. Campbell, PhD, Director, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Thomas P. Campbell is the ninth director of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the largest art museum in the Western Hemisphere. After fourteen years as a curator in the Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts, specializing in tapestries, he was elected Director and CEO in 2008. Campbell has pursued an agenda for the Met that focuses on both scholarship and accessibility. These priorities maintain the museum's focus on exhibitions, publications, acquisitions, and permanent collections, while encouraging new thinking about the visitor experience. Further initiatives have included exploring the judicious use of technology in the Museum and fully integrating education into all the Met's activities. The Met saw its highest attendance in 40 years (2011/12), rising to 6.28 million. During that year the Museum also opened extensive new galleries for both its Islamic and American art. The Museum is currently renovating The Costume Institute and recently completed the redesign of its Fifth Avenue plaza. Its collaboration with the Whitney Museum to use the landmark Breuer Building on Madison Avenue starts in 2015.

Born in Singapore and raised in Cambridge, England, he received his BA in English literature from New College, Oxford followed by a Diploma from Christie's Fine and Decorative Arts course, London. While studying for his Master's degree at the Courtauld Institute of Art (1987), he discovered the extent to which mainstream art history had overlooked the major role that the tapestry medium played in European art and propaganda. His early research culminated in several groundbreaking research articles and a PhD from the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London (1999) on the art and culture of King Henry VIII's court. During his 14 years in the Met's Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts, he rose steadily from Assistant Curator to Curator in December 2008. While there he conceived and organized Tapestry in the Renaissance: Art and Magnificence (2002) and Tapestry in the Baroque: Threads of Splendor, both of which also incorporated drawings, paintings, and prints. The 2002 exhibition was named "Exhibition of the Year" by Apollo magazine and its catalogue won the Alfred H. Barr, Jr. College Art Association Award for distinguished exhibition catalogue in the history of art. He also served as Supervising Curator of The Antonio Ratti Textile Center, which houses the Museum's collection of 36,000 textiles—one of the preeminent centers of textile studies in the world.

Campbell has lectured and taught extensively on European court patronage and the relation of tapestries to the other arts at institutions and museums worldwide. He has published extensively on the subject of historic European textiles and their relationship to other art forms of their periods. His book Henry VIII and the Art of Majesty: Tapestries at the Tudor Court was published by Yale University Press in 2007; his articles have appeared in leading scholarly journals such as Burlington Magazine, Apollo Magazine, Studies in the Decorative Arts, and Gazette des Beaux-Arts. He has received many awards and fellowships, including the Iris Foundation Award (Bard Graduate Center) for a scholar in mid-career deserving of recognition for outstanding contributions to the study of the decorative arts.

Toby Cecchini, Bartender & Author
Toby is a writer and bartender based in New York City. He has written on food, wine and spirits for GQ, Food and Wine, and The New York Times. His first book, Cosmopolitan: A Bartender's Life, was published in 2003. He is currently at work on his second book, a travelogue of spirits based on his travels for The New York Times' Living and travel magazines. He began bartending at the Odeon in 1987, where he is credited with creating the internationally recognized version of the Cosmopolitan cocktail in New York. He followed that with stints in several bars including Passersby, which he owned until 2008. In 2013 he reopened the shuttered Long Island Bar in Cobble Hill Brooklyn.



 The Adjaye Switchel;  By Toby Cecchini


  • 2 oz. roasted banana-infused Plantation 5-year Barbados Grande Réserve Rum
  • 3 oz. Switchel
  • .5 oz. fresh Ginger Syrup
Shake, strain over ice in a double old-fashioned glass. No garnish.

Switchel:
  • 2 Tbsp. Bragg Apple Cider Vinegar
  • 2 Tbsp. honey
  • 2 Tbsp. molasses
  • .25 tsp ginger powder
  • 1 cup water
Mix together ingredients and shake well. Let stand for at least one day before use.

Banana-infused Rum:
Lay six bananas flat on a silicone padded baking tray and roast, in peels, for 20 minutes at 450-500 degrees. Allow to cool and peel. Crush with hands into a large Cambro or other sealable container and pour in 2 liters of the rum. Allow to macerate at room temperature for 36 hours, then strain off the rum and filter out particles.

Fresh Ginger Syrup:
Juice fresh, peeled ginger with an extraction juicer. Add 2 cups white cane sugar to each cup of ginger juice and mix well until sugar is dissolved. Refrigerate.


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