Exhibition: Making Public Buildings uses film, photography, and music to explore Adjaye's creative process. The exhibition follows Adjaye's built and planned public buildings in three stages: from design to production to completion. Photographs from his travels around the world are displayed alongside writings by artists and architects who have informed his practice. The exhibition concludes with Adjaye's completed buildings, accompanied by an original score by composer Peter Adjaye. Models, drawings and films show the evolution of ten major public buildings, focusing on areas of learning, community, contemporary art and housing. The featured buildings include the 2005 Venice Biennale pavilion, the Nobel Peace Center in Oslo and the new Idea Stores in East London. Public Programming: During the course of the exhibition, a range of educational and public programs will be developed for adults, children and families, including at-making workshops that explore the exhibition's focus on architecture and the design of public buildings. These programs will also include special workshops for educators on teaching architectural and design concepts, and tours for school groups. In addition, a public dialogue with David Adjaye about his work, the exhibition, and his thoughts about the future of contemporary architecture is planned.

David Adjaye is one of Britain's leading contemporary architects, whose practice combines the sensual and emotive with a conceptual approach to the fundamental elements of architecture. Refusing to reduce his formal vocabulary to a signature style, he has instead explored scale, measurement, space, light and materials in projects that have included private homes, retail spaces and public buildings. While attention has been focused on his domestic projects in particular, this-his first major international exhibition - will focus on Adjaye's projects in the public realm. Since setting up his own practice in 1994, Adjaye's buildings have emphasized the experience as much as the functionality of the built environment: 'Buildings are deeply emotive structures which form our psyche. People think they're just things they manoeuvre through. But the make-up of a person influenced by the nature of spaces.' Adjaye's greatest concern is to make space itself present, to intensify its experience through almost sculpted shafts of light, different tonalities of colour and materials that reflect and absorb, that combine the smooth with the rough, the refined with the ready made. He choreographs his materials into spaces that do not reveal themselves immediately, eliciting instead a series of physical reactions as the buildings unfold. His process and approach fuse the architectural with the artistic, and has resulted in a number of collaborations with artists such as Chris Ofili and Tim Noble and Sue Webster. David Adjaye was born in Dar-Es-Salam, Tanzania in 1966 and took a foundation course in fine arts before turning to architecture. He graduated from the Royal College of Art in 1993. That same year, he won the RIBA FIrst Prize Bronze Medal and in 1994 he set up his own practice. Since then his projects have included Elektra House and KPG House, both 2001. Dirty House, 2002, Idea Store Chrisp Street, 2004 and the Nobel Peace Centre in Oslo, 2005. Forthcoming buildings include the Idea Store Whitechapel and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver. Adjaye has also collaborated with a number of artists, most notably with Chris Ofili on the Folkestone Library, 2002, at Victoria Miro Gallery, London and the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2003. he designed the Frieze Art Fair Pavilion in 2003, 2004 and 2005, and has been included in the 2002 and 2004 Venice Architecture Biennale and the 2003 Sao Paolo Biennale.