Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Wind is whipping across the water in London’s Canada Dock and Asif Khan is telling me, with great enthusiasm and extravagant gestures, about the “deal porters” who once worked here, carrying timber across narrow plankways. “They were called ‘Blondins’, after the tightrope walker,” he says. “Timber would arrive from the Canadian forests and the deal porters would unload it and carry it from the ships to be stacked, almost dancing across the water. They had a particular way of walking to allow the planks to bounce on their shoulders, and they had to pace in a certain way to keep in rhythm with the movement of these long planks.”We are looking at a lipstick-red bridge that appears to meander across a dock that looks very different to the days when it was rammed with ships from across the Atlantic. Now penned in by a shabby shopping centre, a striking and well-used library and some generic housing towers, the water is being turned into a sanctuary for a handful of waterfowl nesting in the reed beds.The bridge is terrific, a vivid slash of complex carpentry made to appear elegantly simple. “It has an echo of the red of the Canadian flag,” says Khan, its designer. It also has a kind of loping gait, striding across the water like the porters once did.Tall, open and energetic, Khan is an architect and designer whose time appears to be arriving. He is also working at another historic port area, Canning Dock in Liverpool, where, along with US artist Theaster Gates, he is creating a “place of contemplation” to invite reflection on the slave trade. The dry dock was once the place where slave ships were repaired: a real, painfully tangible link to one of the industries that made the city wealthy. Back in his east London office, he shows me a model of a striated mound. “People were asking whether it was just a random shape,” he says. “It’s actually the exact volume of the inside of a hull of a slave ship.”Dad said the public space with the fountains at the Barbican used to remind him of the Gardens of Shalimar in LahoreBetween these two very different dockside projects you can divine Khan’s approach: he can liven up a commercial landscape with wit and elegance, and he can equally make a modest but meaningful intervention into one of Britain’s most charged locations. Khan is simultaneously working at entirely different scales. The day before I visit his office, a former carpet shop in Hackney, I see him at the Barbican Centre, where his practice (alongside architectural firm Allies and Morrison and engineers Buro Happold) is launching a public consultation about a major reworking of the huge City of London cultural complex. When he talks about the project he shifts up a gear.“When we were kids, my dad would bring us here every weekend,” he says. “We never went into the concerts or anything, just used the public space, like it was our living room.” He gestures out towards the landscaped piazza: “Dad said the public space with the fountains used to remind him of the Gardens of Shalimar in Lahore.”If this sounds fanciful, particularly on another steely grey London day, Khan tells me about how Geoffry Powell, one of the architects of the Barbican, was born in Bangalore and how during the Barbican’s design another of its architects, Christoph Bon, was shown around the work of Sri Lankan architect Geoffrey Bawa. The Barbican is a large project, an attempt to strip back some of the later additions and accretions to the brutalist complex, which opened in 1982, and create a clarity more redolent of the original intent.Khan’s own parents were Indian, his father having been born in what is now Pakistan, his mother in Tanzania. Both found careers as social workers. We touch on a few themes around Islam (he made a work for the Islamic Arts Biennale currently running in Saudi Arabia) and I ask about his faith. “I’m a bad Muslim,” he says, a little sheepishly. “When we won the Barbican project I brought my dad to a concert here. It was a way of paying him back, appreciating what he’d done for us. I wouldn’t have taken this job if it wasn’t for that. It means a lot to me.”For a profession in which designers often don’t get to build big until they are in their early fifties, Khan, at 45, is still young. He started early. He had only just graduated from London’s Architectural Association (to which he won a scholarship) when he was commissioned to design a tiny café on Littlehampton’s West Beach in 2008, a neat box with a concrete base and a front window that opened outwards like the front of a doll’s house. He made headlines with his eye-catching design for his Coca-Cola Beatbox Pavilion at the London Olympics in 2012 (designed with Pernilla Ohrstedt). A jumble of red and white cushioned panels clustered together to make an interactive sound installation, it responded to touch with anything from the noise of tennis shoes squeaking on a court to human heartbeats. The supremely theatrical installation led to a slew of pop-up spectaculars, culminating in the carbon fibre arch portals to the Dubai Expo (2020). These looked drawn as much as built, constructed of superfine black lines to create the effect of a lattice or, according to Khan, an echo of the pierced mashrabiya shutters on houses in many parts of the Arab world.If he became known for these kinds of spectacles, his current workload seems more concerned with a more permanent, embedded architecture. About to open is the Tselinny Centre of Contemporary Culture in Almaty, Kazakhstan, a conversion of a huge former Soviet cinema. “The clients wanted to demolish the building,” he tells me, “but I said, no, this is something really important.” The revived building is announced by a facade that resembles the underside of a mushroom, a surface of curving fins softening the socialist realist rigidity. Khan compares it to a cloud, referring to Kazakh mythology of the place where earth and sky and water meet. Echoes of the Soviet era have been retained, including a large mural that is being restored. It will be Khan’s first major public building and it looks, from the photos of it in a snowy landscape, like an intriguing thing.But it’s another project, back near the Barbican, that will expose Khan to a wider British public. The Museum of London’s new building at Smithfield has been a huge undertaking, a conversion of part of the old meat market, an excavation of a cavernous and complex subterranean realm that encompasses train lines, service tunnels and astonishing cliffs of Victorian brick engineering.There’s about a thousand years of slaughter in this place, so the question is, ‘How do you disarm it?’Working with architects Stanton Williams, Khan is designing the entry and events space in the General Market, which is being left raw and ready rather than over-designed and over-proscribed. That will then be surrounded by a parade of 47 shops on the outside, reviving what was once dozens of retail butchers to the street, recreating a much more active frontage. Khan is keen to talk about these. “No museum has ever done anything like this,” he says. “There’s about a thousand years of slaughter in this place, so the question is, ‘How do you disarm it?’ It is a place with a very masculine aura, but we need to ask what else it could be, without sanitising it.” I suggest that the meat market next door closing will make the project something very different: put it in danger of becoming something like Covent Garden, a place for tourists. “For me that history is in the streets,” he replies, “and in the air. We need to reactivate it. So there’ll be an all-night café to keep that nocturnal experience. “The shopfronts,” he says “will create 200m of high street, so that the place can become a coral reef rather than an institution, something alive which allows culture to grow around it and something that is part of the city, that can accommodate change. What is a 21st-century museum? Maybe this is it.”Find out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X, and sign up to receive the FT Weekend newsletter every Saturday morning
