In 2016, Nigerian architect Kunlé Adeyemi, the founder of Amsterdam and Lagos-based firm, NLÉ—it stands for 'at home' in his native Yoruba—presented two small temporary projects that made long-lasting and impactful impressions. In the spring of that year his Makoko Floating School—a government-sponsored prototype timber structure, originally built in the lagoon of Lagos in 2012—was rebuilt during the 15^th Venice Architecture Biennale and won the Silver Lion. And in June his Serpentine Summer House—a playful inverse replica of Queen Caroline’s Temple at the Royal Kensington Gardens in London—was unveiled as part of that year's Serpentine Pavilion extended program.

Since then, Adeyemi’s floating school design evolved into the Makoko Floating System (MFS), an ongoing pop-up project that was integrated into several cultural forums produced all over the world. Following the aforementioned MFS II in Venice, MFS III was built in Bruges, Belgium for the 2018 Bruges Triennale. The same year, three modular units called MFS IIIX3 were assembled in Jincheng Lake in Chengdu, China. In 2021, MFS™ IV, a Mansa Floating Hub appropriated as a cultural platform, was erected in Mindelo, Cabo Verde. More MFS iterations are being planned. Other NLÉ-designed projects include A Prelude to The Shed, a temporary structure built in New York in 2018, and the Black Rhino Academy in Karatu, Tanzania also completed in 2018. Currently, the practice is working on designing sports, judicial, and educational facilities in Rwanda, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, and Switzerland.

Kunlé Adeyemi was born in 1976 in Kaduna, in the north of Nigeria. He grew up on a farm in a family of an architect father, a midwife mother, and three siblings. Kunlé’s father practised modernist architecture with a sensitivity to the tropical climate and African context; he started one of the first indigenous architecture firms in northern Nigeria in the early 1970s. Both of Kunlé’s parents originally came from southern Nigeria, which enabled him to speak the country’s two main dialects in addition to English, the country’s official language used in government and business, as well as in schools and colleges.  

Adeyemi studied architecture at the University of Lagos, in Nigeria’s and Africa’s biggest city. After his graduation in 1999 and working for a couple of years at local firms, he worked at OMA in Rotterdam where he became a senior associate. During his nine-year stint there working directly with the company’s founder, Rem Koolhaas, Adeyemi took an academic break in 2004-05 to pursue a post-professional degree at Princeton. He has been leading his small practice since 2010, while also teaching, most recently at Princeton, Harvard, Columbia, and Cornell Universities. In my interview with Kunlé Adeyemi over a video that coincided with his train ride from Amsterdam to the suburbs to visit a colleague's water reclamation project, we discussed apprenticing for his architect father, lessons he learned from Rem Koolhaas while working for him at OMA in Rotterdam, his vision of building "waterscrapers" instead of skyscrapers, and seeing architecture as a bridge or interface between humanity and the environment.

Vladimir Belogolovsky: I am curious how old were you when you first became aware of your father being an architect? 

Kunlé Adeyemi: For as long as I can remember I knew he was an architect. He was running a large practice and, naturally, I spent a lot of time there and visited construction sites often. The office worked on the design of public works, including schools, hospitals, and hotels. He also built government buildings, a stadium, and a racetrack.

VB: Did you resist studying architecture or did you embrace it from the start?

KA: Everybody said to me, "Oh, you are going to be an architect just like your father." [Laughs.] Of course, I had lots of artistic skills such as drawing. But I imagined myself as anything but an architect. I even dreamed of becoming a pilot. But when the time came to go to college, I was quite convinced that I wanted to study architecture. It was natural to me and I was used to seeing my father at work. He had a strong influence on me. So, in 1992, I started my studies at the University of Lagos, graduating in 1999. It included one year of a strike by the professors, which prolonged my six-year program by a year. It was a combined dual-degree program of Bachelor of Environmental Science and Bachelor of Architecture. 

VB: What did you do during that one year?

KA: It was early on during my studies when I was still a teenager. I worked that year for my father. He let me design a house. It was an extension of his friend’s house. My dad allowed me to design it and supervise its construction. After graduating in 1999, I stayed in Nigeria, working for a couple of years in two different local firms designing mostly small projects, but also a hospital in eastern Nigeria and another prototype hospital design for the government which was then built in several different parts of the country. In 2001, I left for the Netherlands where I started working for Rem Koolhaas’s OMA. I stayed there until 2010, the year I started my practice.

VB: During those years at OMA you also studied at Princeton, right?

KA: That’s right. In 2004, I told Rem I was leaving to continue my education. At the time I started working on a couple of projects in South Korea, so he said, “You have just begun working here.” [Laughs.] He explained that many more opportunities were coming. Then I realised that I could go to school and continue my relationship with the office. Even when I was at Princeton, I would come to the Netherlands to work during my breaks from school and when I graduated in 2005, I was offered a senior associate position. In the next five years, I led several projects, including the Qatar National Library and Qatar National Headquarters in Doha; The Leeum Museum and Prada Transformer in Seoul, South Korea; the Shenzhen Stock Exchange in China; and the New Court Rothschild Bank in London. 

VB: What were some of the lessons you learned from Koolhaas?

KA: There are so many! Rem is great at making you see things differently. He has this ability to make you believe that things can always be better and that you have to try to improve them. He is all about asking questions that have never been asked before and finding different ways of looking at things. When things appear to be ordinary, he finds ways to see them in extraordinary ways. He looks at the extreme ends of the spectrum. Whatever you examine he will push for considering the broadest range of aspects and questions. In his analysis he operates with contrasts, attacking things from different ends. He is also a hard worker and is tough. [Laughs.] He is great at bringing ideas into materiality. Then, of course, he played a tremendous role in shifting our focus from predominantly construction and materiality issues to social and environmental aspects. He was the one who alarmed the profession that the idea of permanence was changing and that buildings should be more flexible and adaptive to their changing environment and programs. 

VB: Any memorable examples? 

KA: Again, there were many. There were incidents when, after long discussions, he would come and turn a working model upside down and that was the solution. Or when we visited a construction site of the Leeum Museum in Seoul, he came across a detail that was not quite finished but he would insist on freezing that moment and preserve it in the final project. He avoids anything that’s too intentional, finished, and too perfect. 

VB: When you talk about your work you use such words and phrases as coexistence in the environment, “waterscrapers,” architecture that floats, adaptation, and water as an asset. How else would you describe your work and what kind of architecture are you trying to achieve? 

KA: Building “waterscrapers” is all about creating structures on and around water to plan water cities and communities intentionally and to better adapt to the rising water level around the world. In the future, “waterscrapers” instead of skyscrapers will become new forms of urbanism. We have to learn how to live with water, not fight it.

Fundamentally, I see architecture as a bridge or interface between humanity and the environment and how architecture can promote diversity and coexistence of the two. The point of architecture is to foster a healthier environment. The idea is that all elements and aspects of architecture and the environment can be mutually beneficial. Also, we try to bring indigenous and ancient knowledge into our own contemporary architecture. We try to learn from simple and logical solutions used by lay people in their daily lives. We often bring these techniques into our practice. We refuse to understand innovation only as modern inventions. We need to be more aware of traditional design techniques as well. 

VB: I would like you to elaborate on a couple of your quotes. You have said, “Architecture is about the experience that you generate, create, and curate with people and for people.” 

KA: Architecture should not be primarily about itself. It is very much more about generating various experiences around it and within. Therefore, we architects have a responsibility not only to build buildings but also to understand the people we build for. The idea of curation comes from the fact that buildings can shape the behaviors of people, to a certain extent. So, it is important to try to understand how people want to behave. Life around the buildings is also part of the architecture. And architecture should have a transformative role in improving the built environment and life around it. 

VB: And finally, you said something that is somewhat contradictory. “I generate solutions that seem as if they belong there; at the same time, they may look as if they came out of nowhere.” 

KA: [Laughs.] What I hope architecture can achieve is to have a feeling as if it has always been there and is an integral part of its local environment through its form, materiality, and response to its context. Yet, it would add value by bringing something new, fresh, inspiring, and transformative. It is a great challenge to make something local and timeless, yet global and super alien. Great architecture combines all of these qualities.