David Adjaye leans forward eagerly on an Eames chair in his Shoreditch office, and laughs when I remind him that his current show at the Whitechapel Art Gallery is the first to be devoted to an architect since its Mies van der Rohe exhibition four years ago. It is a gentle, uneasy laugh, the sonic equivalent of a modest blush, but still shows he is amused by this passing reference that puts his name next to that of one of his profession's legendary figures.
Modesty does not come easily to Adjaye, but he has the endearing habit of occasionally remembering the need for its diplomatic deployment, with comical results, as when he speaks of the clutch of competition wins he has recently enjoyed: "I have won, sort of, 10, as it were, which is slightly unprecedented." He does not need to add that his is one of the most fashionable names in Britain's creative circles, or that his international reputation, following the opening of Oslo's Nobel Peace Center last year, is beginning to flourish.
The Whitechapel exhibition marks Adjaye's move into de-signing public buildings, a relatively recent career progression for the 39-year-old who made his name by designing a stream of high-profile projects for glamorous celebrity clients: the actor Ewan McGregor, his friend the artist Chris Ofili and the rambunctious journalist and broadcaster Janet Street-Porter, of whom more later.
The themes that inspired the designs of his private houses - "the blurring of work and play, the notion of retreat" - prepared him, he says, for the more pressing questions that public buildings demand of their creator. "We have diminished the notion of public life so much, nobody dares touch it. But what I am trying to do is redefine what the idea of a public institution is. It is a long overdue conversation. But maybe the 19th-century model of what a public building is, which was absolutely appropriate for the time and certainly very beautiful, has reached the end of its shelf life. I am sort of asking: 'What's going on?'"
Adjaye's own contribution to answering that question consists of his two highly acclaimed "Idea Stores" in east London, radical, fluid buildings that combine the functions of a library, a community centre and a youth club. Both buildings connect with their local environments inunexpected ways: the White-chapel store is bedecked in blue-and-green-striped glass, recalling the market stall awnings outside; a pedestrian passage along the east side of the site leads to the local supermarket.
The idea of the Idea Store is to attract, entice and invite. It is a very different concept to the monumentalism of Victorian civic architecture, which has exerted such a powerful influence over the past century. "It is a testament to a good model," says Adjaye of the longevity of the 19th-century architecture ethic. "But a good model invokes a certain passive state in people. And that passive state becomes entropic. And then as the entropy sets in, that whole relationship between the building and its environment gets more and more romantic. That's fine, but as a person engaged in building the city, it is fundamental to me that I ask questions."
He talks quickly, fluently and complicatedly. Some of Adjaye's favourite words - "laminate", "porosity" - are architectural terms that give his abstract ideas a sharp, physical profile. The impression is that his view of the world is inseparable from his architecture. But it is not a simplistic view. You don't have to be a French philosopher to follow his flow, but it would help. An essay in the exhibition catalogue defines his architecture as concerned with "opportunism, superficiality, ruse, narration and appropriation. . . The process of design is no exculpatory science (or pseudo-science) but an almost Nietzschean 'gaya scienza'."
But back, bathetically, to east London: I echo the voices of his critics, who say that buildings such as the Idea Stores are indistinguishable from superstores or shopping malls. Did we really want a centre of learning to look like an Ikea store?
"I am deeply suspicious of a built environment which young people understand only in terms of shops and commerce. The name 'Idea Store' is not mine. But the kids who use it completely adore the name, as a status thing, an empowerment thing. And I have never seen, in anything that calls itself a library, that number of different kinds of people, in ethnic and gender terms. It is shocking to me.
"History is the lesson. The Victorian brief was to replicate the palace as a model of empowerment. So if capitalism and commerce provide our dominant icons today. . . " He interrupts himself. "I am not saying that everything has to look like a shop. But then I don't know of a single shop that looks like the Idea Store. Not one."
He says it was important to relate the Whitechapel Idea Store to the adjacent street market. "It is used by everybody, so the building has to engage with it. The message is: you are there, you are doing your commerce, you are just milling around, but you can also go up and learn. I specifically wanted to test the classic French model of the public building as something that sits in the main square and says: 'Look at me, I am a grand école, you'll be so grateful to be here, it is so elevated.'"
Was this an irreversible trend? Did he think libraries would even exist in 50 years' time, or would the country be full of Idea Stores?
"Yes, libraries will exist," he seems to concede almost reluctantly. "But only as a subset of a bigger kind of building."
How about the Nobel Peace Center? Was that an intimidating brief?
About as intimidating as a garden shed, his speedy response implies. "It threw up another phenomenon that architecture has to engage with: the notion of the museum as a piece of data. We don't need actual objects so much today: most archives are image- and data-based. The beautiful thing about that is that it then requires a spatial narrative. You have to turn narrative into a public event."
The Nobel Center is located in Oslo's Vestbanen station, a 19th-century building the exterior of which Adjaye was not allowed to touch. His innovations lay in placing a large aluminium canopy outside the main entrance, wrapped in a perforated map of the world, and in the striking internal design of the museum, the highlight of which is the Nobel Field, a purple-lit room with ambient sound and screens sprouting like nocturnal flowers. Adjaye's use of colour elsewhere is extraordinary, from the deep scarlet of the reception area, to the green-and-yellow Ofili-adorned Café de la Paix.
Bright red was not an obvious colour for a peace centre, I say. "To understand peace, you have to understand conflict," he replies. "The red and the green are used very polemically. And people seem to get it." And the perforated map of the world? "Porosity. I'm very interested in that. The porosity of built fact. It encourages engagement, trying to see through things, being able to understand them."
Given Adjaye's highly refined ideas on the role of buildings in various social contexts, he must have been itching, as a young architect designing his first private houses, to move into the public realm?
I am not even able to finish the sentence before he interrupts, his voice deepening by an octave to convey his seriousness.
"Desperately. Desperately. Desperately. The whole thing has been about getting to this level. The problem with a lot of young architects is that they put all their ideas into one project. But the private and the public realms are very different. My houses are quite hermetic, forbidding, sensuous as well. But they offer a certain refuge for the client, in a city that has become so laminated it doesn't offer any sense of retreat." Adjaye's Elektra and Dirty Houses in London stand like vast, opaque containers in their respective neighbourhoods. It is only through his public work that he has discovered the joys of connecting buildings with people.
He says his friendship with Ofili and other artists has encouraged him to focus more closely on ideas. "All that modernism, form following function, is all very well, but how do you define the function when all you have is a story, or a thought? That's where most architects fail. They usually go for a spectacular bang, as a kind of distraction. What is clear is that we are in a time of ideas, a time of knowledge, a time of thinking through systems. For architecture to be relevant, we have to acknowledge this. Architects have tended to be obsessed by techniques and tools, and have forgotten about ideas and content. It is time to redress that balance. A hundred years of modernists have taught us enough about technique. They have succeeded. Look at Frank Gehry. We can do anything now."
I put it to Adjaye that his architecture demanded a subtle response from the viewer. It didn't wow people.
"Wow is dead. Look at the energy crisis. We can see the end of the rainbow now. To make sensational architecture requires an incredible amount of money. [Gehry's museum in] Bilbaowas the peak. After that, OK, that's it."
Forthcoming projects include two more community centres named after important Afro-Caribbean figures, the politician Bernie Grant and the murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence. Had these commissions been specifically sought by Adjaye, son of a Ghanaian diplomat but principally raised in London?
"I was asked. I didn't seek them. But they are important in that they cater for communities that feel a lack of engagement with the city in which they live. One of the repercussions of a dominant [architectural] culture is that it alienates the supportive cultures into feeling disconnected and disempowered.
"These are edification projects. They are edifying a community that has low self-esteem, that doesn't believe it has access to these arenas. It is: look and believe. It is what the church did. Hey, come and have a go."
Few obstacles seem to lie in the path of Adjaye's rising star. He has captured the imagination with a blend of postmodern architecture that has gone beyond the feeble first phase of that movement, all pastiches and literalism, to engage with the dominant social trends of the day: access, democracy, civic empowerment.
Last year, however, came the inevitable hiccup: he was excoriated in the press by a high-profile client, Janet Street-Porter, for faults in the "Fog House" he designed for her. How had that made him feel? "I was bloodied. That is the other side of having such a high profile. You are very exposed. It was a really shocking moment. And I tell you, the phones went quiet for a while. If it weren't for the fact that I had an international profile, that would have crashed my career."
The only other press attacks he regularly suffered were for his use of "pretentious" language. "Can you believe it? I'm attacked for using a word like 'specificity'. I know what that means. I'm just trying to find the right words for ideas."
I say the British don't like that kind of thing, and he should go to France. "Oh, with the French, it's the opposite, you have to up the words. Otherwise, it's: 'Heez language eez a bit weak.
