Adedoyin Teriba
Dartmouth College | Assistant Professor of Modern and Contemporary Architecture & Urbanism
"Aided by His Forebears: the Smithsonian Museum of African American History & Culture and a Multi-racial America"
Wednesday, Oct. 12, 2022
6 pm - 7:30 pm
Hayes Hall 403
AIA continuing education credits pending (1 LU)
Ever since the Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture opened its doors to its permanent home in 2016 — designed by the consortium of the Freelon Group, Bond Davis Brody Associates, Adjaye Associates and the Smith Group —it has drawn significant numbers of visitors from around the country and internationally. It has and continues to serve as a space through which the United States of America explores its status as a nation, American identity and citizenship. This lecture will explore how Sir David Adjaye’s architectural solution draws inspiration from his architectural forebears in Africa and its diaspora, in order to rethink what constitutes contemporary architecture in the United States of America — perhaps even reminding this country in architectural terms of its multi-racial make up.
Biography
Adedoyin Teriba, Assistant Professor of modern and contemporary architecture & urbanism at Dartmouth College
Adedoyin Teriba is an Assistant Professor of modern and contemporary architecture & urbanism at Dartmouth College. He specializes in modern and contemporary architecture & urbanism — focusing particularly on such traditions in West Africa and its diasporas. Teriba's teaching and scholarship investigate the ways in which folklore, orality, language, art, dance, and music are used as tools — historically and presently — to generate an architecture that creates a sense of place. Teriba is also interested in the ways that performance-based ways of creating architecture have been a staple of architectural design in parts of Africa and its diasporas for the last two hundred years or more.
He took his Ph.D. from Princeton University and has been the recipient of grants from the Center of Arts and Cultural Policy Studies as well as the Program of Latin American Studies at Princeton University. His most recent publications are “Orality and Permanence: Restoring a Gbongan Palace Through Spoken Architectural History,” in last Autumn’s edition of the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (Volume 80, Number 3, 2021), and “Style, Race and Architecture of a Mosque of the Òyìnbó Dúdú (White-Black) in Lagos Colony, 1894,” in Race and Modern Architecture: A Critical History from the Enlightenment to the Present (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020). Before becoming an historian, Teriba worked as an architect in the United States and Nigeria.
Teriba's current book project, Architecture's Figures: Assimilation and Cultures in Colonial Nigeria, interrogates how African diasporic settlers in Southwest Nigeria and Nigerian locals used a motley of architectural forms (including neo-baroque) to create new figures of Yorùbá speech; novel ideas of immortality as well as impact regional masquerade designs and the directional flow of masquerade processions in urban Southwest Nigeria.
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