Among the names of mostly white men and a few women that have been carved into the marble walls of the Royal Institute of British Architects since 1848, this year will see a first. Lesley Lokko, a Ghanaian-Scottish architect and academic, has been announced as the winner of RIBA’s gold medal, becoming the first African woman to receive the gong – and only the second black architect to be honoured in its history.
“It was a bit of an out-of-body experience,” she said, on hearing the news. “It was so far off my radar – I’m not a practising architect by any stretch of the imagination.” Lokko, 60, may not design buildings, but she has long been one of architecture’s most energetic advocates for widening access to the profession. As a teacher, writer and curator, she has dedicated her career to amplifying underrepresented voices, exploring the relationship between architecture, identity and race, and trying to democratise what has always been a rarefied pursuit. She has taught around the world, founded two architecture schools – one in Johannesburg, South Africa, another in Ghana’s capital, Accra – and curated the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale, putting the focus on the African continent for the first time.
Fittingly, she will be awarded the medal in May by the RIBA’s first black president, and youngest ever: Nigerian-born Muyiwa Oki. The 33-year-old was elected last year after a grassroots campaign to elevate a young “architectural worker” to the lofty role rather than the principal of an eponymous practice, as is usually the case.
“A fierce champion of equity and inclusion in all aspects of life,” said Oki of Lokko. “Her progressive approach to architecture education offers hope for the future – a profession that welcomes those from all walks of life, considers the needs of our environment, and acknowledges a broad range of cultures and perspectives.”
Born in Dundee, to a Ghanaian father and a Scottish Jewish mother, Lokko grew up in Accra. She was sent to Malvern College boarding school in England at the age of 17, and went on to study Hebrew and Arabic at Oxford, but dropped out to spend five years in the US, where she studied sociology and law before settling on architecture. She graduated from the Bartlett school of architecture at University College London in 1992 before moving back to Ghana in 2000, where she wrote several bestselling racy novels, and completed a practice-based PhD by building her own mud-brick house.
An invitation to be an external examiner at the University of Johannesburg brought her back to architectural education, and she became an associate professor in 2014, founding the first postgraduate architecture school in Africa there the following year. When she was hired, the architecture programme had 11 students, all white.
“In South Africa,” Lokko told the Guardian in 2020, “I used to have very interesting conversations with the vice-chancellor of the university about why there are not more African academics in architecture. I said that it was not our job to go out and find them; it was our job to make them. It’s a project that takes two generations.”
In 2019, Lokko was appointed to lead the Spitzer school of architecture at City College in New York, but she resigned the following year, citing a “lack of respect and empathy for black women”. Four years on, she sees parallels with the recent treatment and resignation of Harvard’s first black president, Claudine Gay.
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“For all of our talk of inclusivity and diversity and togetherness,” said Lokko, “when these moments happen, they are vicious. You are bearing the brunt of that brutality, and it’s a deeply scary space to be in.” Nonetheless, she is optimistic about changes she has seen in architectural education over the last few years, particularly since the wider societal reckoning triggered by the murder of George Floyd.
“The kneejerk reaction is to employ more people of colour,” she said, “and implement policies that make sure you’re more representative, but the canon itself doesn’t change very much. I think we’re now at the point where the canon and the content, and who’s delivering it, are beginning to catch up. The younger generation is impatient for meaningful change – not just lip service to policy, but change in the way they’re taught, what they’re reading, and who they’re being taught by.”
Lokko’s Venice Biennale was a powerful corrective to the usual focus on the global north, spotlighting the scarred landscapes of postcolonial Africa, and giving a platform to a new generation of young, optimistic African architects, framing the continent as a “laboratory of the future”. It was the second-most visited edition of the architecture biennale in its history, with young people and students accounting for almost 40% of visitors, and featured a “biennale college” for the first time.
“Africa has an incredibly youthful population who are really hungry and ambitious,” said Lokko. “But education is the biggest challenge: there are under 90 accredited schools on a continent of nearly a billion people. And often the curricula they are following have been inherited from former colonial powers. The speed of change is also enormous, and we don’t have the educational infrastructure to tackle that yet.”
Driven by these challenges, Lokko founded the African Futures Institute in Accra in 2021, as a nimble “pan-African thinktank”. It was originally conceived as an accredited architecture school, to be partnered with an institution from the global north, but the urgency of the situation has made Lokko rethink the model. It will begin this year with a nomadic studio in Morocco, focused on Maghrebi identity and migration, with 30 fully funded places open to global applicants, half from Africa. Lokko is also fundraising to build a centre for the institute in Accra – in between finishing the manuscript of her 13th novel, The Lonely Hour, due out next year.
“I vacillate between writing funding proposals, feasibility studies and sex scenes,” she said. Which is probably another first for an RIBA gold medal winner.