Where the National Cathedral's first article follows the project's funding and politics, David Adjaye's actual design answers a different question entirely: what a building meant to represent an entire nation's Christianity should look like. Adjaye drew his central forms from Akan symbols of authority rather than from any established church architecture, most directly the stool, an Akan emblem of leadership believed in traditional practice to hold the spirit of the person who sits on it. His design lifts that private symbol of individual power and rebuilds it at cathedral scale as a shared national space, alongside references to a ceremonial canopy, called the Boaman, and to the Tabernacle of Hebrew scripture, layering indigenous and biblical symbolism rather than choosing between them.
Color carries its own deliberate reading throughout the complex. Adjaye's design uses red, black and white, the same three colors that appear across Ghanaian textile and regalia traditions, and assigns them a double meaning: read as Christian symbolism they reference the Trinity, and read through Ghanaian tradition they stand for the blood, the spirit and heart, and the power of the Ghanaian people respectively, a single palette meant to speak in both vocabularies simultaneously.
Adjaye described the whole complex as intended to embody unity, harmony and spirituality for people of every faith, not solely for the Christian congregations it will formally serve, extending an argument the building's political critics have disputed on entirely different grounds: whether a constitutionally secular state should be building a monument to any single faith's symbolism at all, however broadly that symbolism is drawn.