In conversation with Lesley Lokko

I don’t know if we can say anymore that there’s a single most important challenge. Our challenges today are myriad and complex, overlapping and intertwined, simultaneously local and global, happening both in places we think we understand and in places we know nothing about. Perhaps most important is the ability to distinguish how challenges overlap and interconnect. How and where is climate change related to social injustice? How is resource scarcity linked to lifestyle? What is the relationship between migration and political instability? How do we educate both ourselves and younger generations to deal meaningfully with the complexity of our times without giving up? We seem to have more and more tools of information and knowledge at our disposal but correspondingly less and less idea what to do with them. I give a reaonsable number of lectures each year, and with each passing year, the questions from students become more and more vague: ‘what should I do with my life? How can I change things? The world is so difficult right now, what can I do?’ Whilst there’s a great energy and hunger to do something, there’s also a corresponding confusion about where to start. Figuring out how to translate the huge, overarching challenges of climate, identity, migration, greed, exploitation, and racism into manageable, impactful steps that we can all take might be the biggest challenge of all. 

The answer is already embedded in the question. You said it perfectly: the relationship between people and space is the foundation of design. Architecture is the relationship between people and space. We could expand on that by saying it’s also the exploration of the relationship between people and space, acknowledging that the relationship changes over time and is influenced by many other factors: context, climate, resources, politics and policy, and so on, but any exploration of architecture that doesn’t take people and place into account isn’t architecture, in my humble opinion. Ego, vanity, greed . . . there are many ways to describe the result of spatial and formal explorations that don’t take peoples’ needs (and those can be practical as well as ephemeral) into account, but ‘architecture’ isn’t one of them. We clearly have the tools to build efficiently and effectively — from renders to BIM — but we haven’t developed the tools to understand clearly what people need, want, desire, cherish. In the 70s, the Brazilian philosopher Roberto Mangabeira Unger put it brilliantly: I no longer remember his exact words, but he suggested that the failure of contemporary architecture was threefold: one is artistic, the absence of any canonical set of forms; the second is in engineering, the failure of physical constraints to determine the shape of buildings and the third is social, the inability of any one group in society to get its anxieties recognised as the ones that count.’ It’s the third failure that speaks (to me, at least) most clearly to your question. We seem to have lost the ability to negotiate or discuss our differences: now it’s just a shouting match. Perhaps the failure is with us, not with architecture. Perhaps ‘space for discourse’ should be at the heart of all design.

There are many ways to ‘know’ things but reading and literacy are high up the ladder when it comes to how we learn about the world, at least in a ‘modern’ sense. There are of course deep and meaningful forms of knowledge that have nothing to do with the ability to read or write, but for the most part, their scale is local, rarely spreading beyond the living guardians. Magazines play a huge role in disseminating ideas which over time, may deepen and mature into what we might call ‘canon’, the lasting ideas of our times. Magazines are different from books and academic journals, which often perceive themselves (and are perceived) as a more rigorous form of knowledge, but magazines can be the catalysts for new ideas and fresh insights that don’t require the complex and usually hidden support infrastructure that underpins anyone who writes a book or contributes to an academic journal. It’s hard to write a book whilst in a full-time job or without a university position, however tenuous. Peer-reviewed academic papers require a network of peers, most of whom are financially compensated (at least implicitly, if not explicitly) by their part-time or tenured institutional positions. Magazines offer different kinds of possibilities for those outside those circles. Folio: Journal of Contemporary African Architecture is very much an amateur publication, not a professional one. But, as I’ve said elsewhere, my muse has always been the amateur, not the professional, the one who, in accordance with the original meaning of the word ‘amateur’, does it for the sheer love of the project, unafraid to fail over and over again.