‘We rode out the storm’: David Adjaye's firm projects confidence after 'worst year'
Adjaye Associates has insisted it is “feeling bullish” after reporting a loss of £720,000 and a downturn in revenue during the year that its founder David Adjaye faced allegations of sexual misconduct.
The practice said its pre-tax profit margin would have stayed in the black without a one-off payment of £1.46m made after “reviewing claims for withholding taxes from foreign jurisdictions”.
The firm’s latest accounts, covering for the year to December 2023, cover the period when Adjaye was accused of sexual misconduct towards three women, which he has consistently denied.
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The accusations, first published in the Financial Times, led to the practice being dropped from a number of high profile projects including the £57m International Slavery Museum in Liverpool.
The fallout from the story also led to Adjaye stepping down from a number of key roles including as design advocate for the Mayor of London and a ceremonial association with architecture school the African Futures Institute.
But the RIBA Gold Medal-winning architect made no mention of the allegations in the accounts, instead blaming the firm’s performance on a “commercially challenging year for the construction industry at large”, adding that a global economic slowdown had led to “delays on a number of significant projects”.
While turnover dropped from £20.5m to £17.1m, a spokesperson for the practice described the fall in revenue as a “blip” and said the firm was “feeling confident and carrying on”.
“We had a storm thrown at us and we toughed it out,” the spokesperson said, admitting that 2023 had been “possibly the worst year that any architecture firm could have gone through”.
The firm also claimed that a cut in staff numbers during the accounting period from 96 to 85 was relatively minor given the circumstances, while describing its profit margin as “commendable” if the one-off tax payment was excluded.
The spokesperson declined to comment on the tax payment, which the firm blamed for sending its pre-tax profit tumbling into the red from £2.5m in 2022.
Turnover in the practice’s two largest markets also fell during the period, from £14m to £13m in the Middle East and from £4.8m to just £892,000 in Asia.
However, income rose in Africa from £261,400 to £1.46m and from 684,000 to £984,000 in the UK.
The firm paid a dividend of £1.9m during the year. Adjaye is listed as the sole director of the company, which is majority owned by its parent company Adjaye Holdings Limited, which is in turn majority owned by Adjaye.
Major projects completed by the practice during 2023 included the King Salman Park Visitor Centre in Riyadh, the George Street Plaza and Community Building in Sydney and a residential tower in New York called 130 William.
