A certain swath of the collective museum-going, architecture-loving audience must be endlessly fascinated by the success of David Adjaye. Just forty-one years old, his rise to the top echelon of his profession has happened quickly, and has just as suddenly put his name into the minds of a larger group interested in celebrity homes, industrial design, and the perversely compelling cult of genius prodigies. That Adjaye is arguably the most prominent contemporary (if not twentieth-century) architect of African descent might also be deserving of some scrutiny, and yet Adjaye takes pains to suppress that aspect of his work, perhaps as a preventative or preemptive measure taken against those who might judge his accomplishments through the lens of affirmative action. Adjaye’s prestige is honestly earned and all his own, and clearly comes as a result of being one of the more thoughtful, articulate, and open-minded architects working before the public today. The projects themselves, on an extended exhibition journey that began at London’s Whitechapel Gallery at the beginning of 2006, are quite subtle and restrained. They generally lack the bombast of Eisenman, Gehry, Koolhaas—architects consumed, respectively, with fashionable theories of Deleuzian folds, Baroque effluvium, or satirical rebuffs to critiques of globalization....