Professor Lesley Lokko OBE (Ghana/Scotland)

A leading voice in architecture named on the list of the 100 most influential people of 2024 by Time Magazine, Lokko is founder of the African Futures Institute, and was curator of the Venice Architecture Biennale 2023.

Professor Lesley Lokko OBE is the Founder and Chair of the African Futures Institute (AFI) in Accra, Ghana. She holds a BSc (Arch), MArch and PhD in Architecture from the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London.

She was the Founder and Director of the Graduate School of Architecture, University of Johannesburg (2014—2019). She is the Editor of White Papers, Black Marks: Race, Culture, Architecture (University of Minnesota Press, 2000) and the Editor-in-Chief of FOLIO: Journal of Contemporary African Architecture. She is currently a Visiting Professor at the Bartlett School of Architecture and at University College Dublin. She was appointed Curator of the 18th International Architecture Biennale at La Biennale di Venezia in 2023. In January 2023, she was awarded an OBE ‘for services to architecture and education’ in King Charles’ New Year’s Honours List. In January 2024, she was awarded the UK’s highest architecture award, the RIBA Royal Gold Medal. In April 2024, she was named one of the world’s 100 most influential people in the annual TIME100 list.

This session is supported by the British Council.

How does the theme of Common Interests resonate with you and your work?

We’re so in sync it’s a little disconcerting! One of my main interests, even in architecture, is language. What we say, what we mean, what we interpret and what we build are so closely interlinked that it’s impossible (for me at least) to think of architecture in any other way. It’s a language — it narrates, it shapes, it explains, it frames, it guides — with different tools and means to speech and the written word, of course, but the basic principles are the same. Architecture strives to give meaning to our lives.

As an African student of architecture in the global North, I struggled to find space (literally) to develop and explore my own, culturally located and specific voice. It seemed to me then, as it does now, that students who came to architectural education from contexts other than the European/American ones that have shaped architectural canon since the Renaissance were tasked with two things: learn the dominant architectural language so well that it became a mother tongue and learn how to translate.

To translate well, you must find concepts in common between the two (or three) languages you speak/write/draw/build. So, from the outset, the word ‘common’ is paramount. What do we have in common? What are the shared values, ethics, approaches that we can rely on to help us navigate new territories, new spaces, new ways of seeing the world? Reading the statement, ‘public spaces are not always spaces of cohesion, but rather spaces of interests examined through lenses of “Country”, ecology, climate, diversity, activation and technology’ made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. The term ‘Country’ is specifically Australian but it’s an amazing example of the potential impact of a different way of understanding the world that has such powerful ramifications for us globally.

What are some of your favourite projects that have transformed urban space?

I was on the Aga Khan Award for Architecture Master Jury in 2016 and loved Superkilen, the project by BIG. It’s a brilliant public space, on the one hand, but on the other, challenges so many assumptions about who the ‘we’ in the word ‘public’ can be. I particularly liked the fact that the project upends the ages-old dichotomy of there being many ‘worlds’ — the so-called Arab world, the developing world, the Third World — as somewhere else, other than Europe. No, our worlds are intertwined, co- and mutually dependent on one another and always have been.

Barcelona is one of my favourite cities for the quality of its urban spaces, from small squares to huge boulevards. But my list also contains spaces that aren’t always classified as ‘urban’ or ‘public’ space. Markets, bazaars, beaches . . . like everything else, meanings can be both universal and site specific. 

What do you hope audiences attending Living Cities Forum come away with?

A sense of hope and optimism in the midst of such challenging and aggressive times; a sense of having learned or experienced something unexpected or new; and a renewed understanding and appreciation for the power of the built and natural environments.