16/03/2021
Tomorrow, Wednesday 17 March, Architecture Talks! returns with a fascinating contribution by Dr Lesley Lokko, who will be discussing issues of gender, race and identity in architectural education. Join us online at 17:30 for the penultimate talk if this academic year.
Lesley Lokko
Burning Down the House
2020 was a global annus horribilis, a year in which the word ‘unprecedented’ gained worldwide notoriety. The global COVID-19 pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests put issues of health, equity, justice and design firmly on the proverbial map, yet architectural education was largely caught off-guard. Post-events, schools across the world rushed to proclaim their diversity commitment and credentials but the deep, difficult work of articulating why and how such issues matter, remains largely unresolved. To fully understand diversity in rich, creative and innovative ways often means a fundamental re-think of both canon and curriculum. This 45-minute lecture and Q&A will explore a number of student projects that tackle issues of race, identity and gender in diverse and often divergent ways.
Lesley Lokko trained as an architect at the Bartlett School of Architecture and holds a PhD in Architecture from the same institution. She was the founder and director of the Graduate School of Architecture at the University of Johannesburg from 2014 — 2019. She recently resigned from her position as Dean of Architecture at the Spitzer School of Architecture, CCNY, and is now engaged in building the African Futures Institute, an independent postgraduate school of architecture and events space in Accra, Ghana. In 2021, she will hold visiting professorships at The Cooper Union, University of Virginia and Yale University. She is the editor of White Papers, Black Marks: Race, Culture, Architecture (University of Minnesota Press, 2000); editor-in-chief of FOLIO: Journal of Contemporary African Architecture. She is also a series editor of the Design Research in Architecture (UCL Press), together with founders Jonathan Hill and Murray Fraser. In 2004, she made the successful transition from academic to novelist with the publication of her first novel, Sundowners (Orion 2004), a UK-Guardian top forty best-seller, and has since then followed with eleven further best-sellers, which have been translated into fifteen languages, including Turkish, Albanian and Finnish. She has lectured and published widely on the subject of race, identity and architecture, and has served on many international juries and awards over the past decade, including the Aga Khan Award for Architecture, ArchiPrix, the RIBA President’s Medals, Archmarathon and the Venice Biennale.
