What If Everything You Learned About Architecture Was Wrong? Lesley Lokko Has Answers

Professor Lesley Naa Norle Lokko OBE (born 1964) is a Ghanaian-Scottish architect, educator, novelist, and curator. Born in Dundee, Scotland, she was raised between Ghana and the United Kingdom a bicultural upbringing that profoundly shaped her understanding of identity, space, and belonging . She attended Ghana International School in Accra for her O-Levels, then completed her A-Levels at St. James & the Abbey in West Malvern, UK and Oxford College of Further Education . Her early career was remarkably diverse. Before entering architecture, she worked as an administrator in Los Angeles, a marketing manager at American Shizuki Corporation, and even a graphic designer at Lloyd’s of London. She briefly studied Hebrew and Arabic at St. Catherine’s College, Oxford University before finding her true calling.

Architectural Education at the Bartlett

Lokko’s architectural journey began at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London (UCL) one of the world’s most influential architecture schools. She earned her BSc in Architecture in 1992, followed by her Diploma in Architecture with Distinction in Design and Technical Studies in 1995. She later completed her PhD in Architecture from the University of London in 2007 . Her time at the Bartlett coincided with a transformative period. Peter Cook arrived in 1990 the year after she began and introduced the unit system that would revolutionize architectural pedagogy. This experience would later inspire her own educational innovations. “The Bartlett’s approach to architecture as a much more lateral, expansive, expanded discipline sits very well here,” she later reflected about transplanting this model to Africa.

Early Academic Career and White Papers, Black Marks

Lokko’s academic career began in the United States. She served as Assistant Professor of Architecture at Iowa State University (1997–1998) and the University of Illinois at Chicago (1998–2000). In 2000, she became the Martin Luther King Visiting Professor of Architecture at the University of Michigan. In 2000, she published her seminal edited volume with the University of Minnesota Press one of the first major architectural texts to critically examine the intersection of race and space. The book established her as a leading voice in discussions about identity and the built environment. She returned to the UK for nearly a decade, teaching at Kingston University, University of North London, and the University of Westminster, where she established the Master of Arts programme in Architecture, Cultural Identity and Globalisation (MACIG) . She also held visiting positions at UC Berkeley, KTH Stockholm, and the University of Cape Town.

Bestselling Novelist: From Architecture to Fiction

Lokko described her first book, Sundowners (Orion), as a “successful transition from academic to novelist” in 2004. Due to the book’s commercial success, she went on to publish thirteen best-selling books that were translated into fifteen different languages. Her novels include:

• Sundowners (2004)
• Saffron Skies (2005)
• Bitter Chocolate (2008)
• Rich Girl, Poor Girl (2009)
• One Secret Summer (2010)
• A Private Affair (2011)
• An Absolute Deception (2012)
• Little White Lies (2013)
• In Love & War (2014)
• The Last Debutante (2016)
• A Trophy Wife (2020)
• The Bid (2022)
• The Lonely Hour (forthcoming from Pan Macmillan)

Her most popular book, Sundowners, has an average rating of 4.15, reflecting her ability to weave compelling stories of globetrotting women, complex families, and hidden desires. These novels, often categorized as “glam lit,” explored the lives of powerful, cosmopolitan women of the African diaspora, subtly deconstructing race, class, and belonging long before she brought those themes to architectural podiums. This literary sensibility taught her to see cities as narratives. A building, she learned, tells you what a society values and who it leaves out.

“I was on a one-novel-a-year contract, I had no intention of coming back to academia,” she later admitted. “But by the 10th novel I was running out of steam.”

Graduate School of Architecture, University of Johannesburg

The turning point came when she was invited to the University of Johannesburg as an external examiner. “I found that I really enjoyed it, realized how much I missed it,” she recalled. She joined first as an Associate Professor, then in 2014/2015 founded the Graduate School of Architecture (GSA) the only school in Africa offering the unit system. The GSA was modelled after Harvard’s Graduate School of Design and London’s Architectural Association, but with a distinctly African character. When Lokko started the school in 2014, there were just 11 students. By 2019, enrollment had grown to 130. The nickname “The Bartlett of the South” stuck, though Lokko noted it wasn’t entirely accurate. The school’s approach resonated deeply in post-Apartheid South Africa, where “spatial ideology was such a strong component of the Apartheid regime”. She observed a “strange tension in South Africa between the socially-responsible aspirations of the architecture discipline and the way it was actually practiced for years, as a tool of oppression”. The GSA became a space to reimagine the architect as “someone who restores social justice, who thinks about a more equitable future, who thinks about inclusion rather than segregation”.

Dean at City College of New York and Return to Ghana

Lokko was named Dean of The City College of New York’s (CCNY) Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture in June 2019. She did, however, quit in 2020 to go back to her native nation. She established the African Futures Institute (AFI), an autonomous postgraduate school of architecture, research facility, and platform for public events, in Accra, Ghana, in 2021. “A new model of education, research, and public dialogue that unites the arts, humanities, and sciences” is the goal of AFI. The institute’s vision is to “position Africa as a central generator of ideas about the future” recognizing the continent as one of the world’s youngest and fastest-urbanizing regions. In 2025, AFI launched its flagship Nomadic African Studio (NAS) a pan-African itinerant teaching program that held its first edition in Fez, Morocco, with the next iteration planned for Accra in 2026.

Major Awards and Honors

Lokko’s contributions have been recognized through numerous prestigious awards:

• RIBA Royal Gold Medal (2024) — The UK’s highest architecture award, presented on behalf of His Majesty the King. RIBA President Muyiwa Oki called her “a humble revolutionary force.
• TIME100 (2024) — Named one of TIME magazine’s 100 Most Influential People, with profile written by filmmaker Ava DuVernay
• OBE (2023) — Officer of the Order of the British Empire for services to architecture and education, in King Charles III’s first New Year’s Honours List
• RIBA Annie Spink Award (2020) — For Excellence in Architectural Education
• AR Ada Louise Huxtable Prize (2021) — For Contributions to Architecture
• African Cultural Icon Award (2026) — Honoring leaders in creative arts who promote African culture globally
• BBC 100 Women (2025)
• Ebony Power 100 (2025)
• Forbes 50 Over 50 Global (2026)
• France’s Grande Médaille de l’Académie d’Architecture
• Honorary Fellow, Royal Incorporation of Architects in Scotland (RIAS) (2022)
• Honorary Fellow, Nigerian Institute of Architects
• Honorary Fellow, Royal Canadian Institute of Architects

Current Roles and Philosophy

Lokko currently serves as:

• Founder and Chair of the African Futures Institute
• Director of the Nomadic African Studio
• Visiting Professor at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL
• Visiting Full Professor at University College Dublin
• Trustee of the London-based Architecture Foundation
• Founding Member of the Council on Urban Initiatives co-founded by LSE Cities, UN-Habitat, and UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose

Her philosophy centers on “amplifying under-represented voices and examining the complex relationship between architecture, identity and race”. In her Royal Gold Medal acceptance speech, she declared:

“Architecture gave me language, in all its forms visual, written, built, performed and that language, in turn, has given me such hope.”  She describes her approach as “soft power” the ability to co-opt rather than coerce, shaping preferences through appeal and attraction. Her work consistently challenges the notion that African architecture must follow Western models, instead positioning the continent as a “laboratory of the future” a place where new forms of thinking, building, and living can emerge.

Legacy and Impact

Lesley Lokko’s career represents a remarkable trajectory from marketing assistant to bestselling novelist, from Bartlett student to founder of Africa’s most innovative architecture schools, from academic to the first Black curator of the Venice Architecture Biennale. She has fundamentally reshaped how the world thinks about African architecture, architectural education, and the relationship between race and space. By creating institutions like the GSA and AFI, she has built sustainable platforms for nurturing new voices across the continent. Her work demonstrates that architecture is not merely about buildings, but about “language, in all its forms  visual, written, built, performed” and that this language can be a tool of liberation, imagination, and hope .