Ruby City

David Adjaye’s latest work is a shining interpretation of late artist and collector Linda Pace’s dream for an arts centre in San Antonio, Texas

- Gauri Kelkar

A blazing red, sharp-featured angular outcrop on 150 Camp Street in San Antonio self-confidently sprawls across 14,000 square feet. The Ruby City arts centre was built to fulfil the last wishes of the late Linda Pace, back in 2007, to create an enriching artistic hub for the city; the artist, collector and philanthropist succumbed to breast cancer that same year. Such was the specificity of detail of the building she had dreamed about, right down to the colour she wanted it to be in, that it was as good as made before it fell into a then-upcoming-architect David Adjaye’s hands, to be given form, structure and character. “Ruby City fits into a narrative that is incredibly important to me, making civic and social spaces that are about bringing in diverse constituents from the city and its visitors, a socially constructed architecture that can edify the community,” says the British-Ghanaian architect. Indeed, there have been few structures (new and old) of significance that have escaped his attention—the National Museum of African American Culture and History in Washington, DC, the Nobel Peace Center in Oslo, Norway, and closer home, the still-in-the-works silk weaving centre in Varanasi.

BUILDING MEANING