In this talk the eminent educator and writer Prof Lesley Lokko joins us to talk about her work, and the tools she has developed to allow an open and participatory engagement with architecture in the programme she developed at the Johannesburg GSD.

Lesley Lokko is an architect, academic, and best-selling novelist. As an educator she was awarded the RIBA Annie Spink Award 2021 for outstanding contribution to this field. She was previously the founder and director of the Graduate School of Architecture at the University of Johannesburg and as dean of The Bernard & Anne Spitzer School of Architecture, City College of New York. She is now setting up an independent school of architecture in Accra, Ghana, the African Futures Institute. 

While still a student, Lesley began an edited anthology that has come to define her interests across both her academic career and her fiction writing: ‘race’ and its relationship to the built environment, although that initial interest has expanded considerably to encompass a broader interest in identity politics, culture and urbanism. White Papers, Black Marks: Race, Space & Architecture was published in 2000, some six years after its inception. It remains one of the few anthologies dedicated specifically to the study of ‘race’ as a meaningful category of enquiry within architectural canon.