Editor’s note: Tyler wrote this story for our next issue, but as its subject, Lesley Lokko, just announced to Architectural Record her resignation as Dean of Spitzer, we decided it would best serve our readers to publish the story now.
By complete coincidence, Dean Lokko is participating in a long planned Review discussion next week, ‘A Case for Public Design Education’ - register here.
“The world itself is on the edge of some kind of radical reimagining,” Lesley Lokko speculated at her September launch (via Zoom) of volume two of FOLIO: Journal of Contemporary African Architecture, a publication she founded and edits. Just a few weeks later, it’s clear Dean Lokko was then on the edge of her own reimagining. In a statement to Architectural Record about her sudden resignation as the Dean of City College’s Spitzer School of Architecture, Lokko cited her struggle “to build enough support to be able to deliver on either my promise of change, or my vision of it.” Through the launch of FOLIO and subsequent follow-up conversations with the dean and members of the Spitzer community, I glimpsed in America’s cultural climate and approach to design education the roots of tensions that led to Lokko’s untimely departure.
The title of FOLIO’s second volume, Noir Radical – a wry allusion to the eponymous mascara by Yves-Saint Laurent – aims at more than cosmetic makeover. One attendee of the virtual launch, Shawn Rickenbacker, Associate Professor and Director of Spitzer’s J. Max Bond Center for Urban Futures, noted its similarity to the term “Black radical,” associated with Sixties-era Revolutionary Black nationalism in America. Lokko, a Scottish-Ghanaian architect, educator, and novelist, previously edited White Papers, Black Marks: Architecture, Race, Culture (Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2000), born out of her frustration with architecture’s failure to meaningfully grapple with race. With Noir Radical – published on Issuu due to pandemic-related printing delays – she has expanded her community of contributors as well as her critical focus. At 387 pages (more a book than a journal) three sections consider issues of development, discipline, and discourse and feature the work of forty contributors from across Africa and its global diaspora, from Kigali to Cape Town, Nairobi to New York.
FOLIO emerged out of South Africa’s pedagogical reforms begun in 2015, the year the University of Cape Town’s bronze statue of 19th century British imperialist Cecil Rhodes became the rallying point for Rhodes Must Fall, a student-led protest movement against racial oppression and the enduring legacy of apartheid that led to nationwide calls to decolonize education. In the following months, a second student movement under the banner #FeesMustFall protested the country’s rising tuition costs and higher education’s failed social promises. Widespread university property damage was met with police brutality. Amid these uprisings, the University of Johannesburg formed the Graduate School of Architecture (GSA) with a singular mission: transform African architectural education. With Lokko at its helm, the GSA became the continent’s first dedicated postgraduate architecture school and FOLIO its first peer-reviewed journal of contemporary African architecture.
The United States today is no less marked by racial reckoning, and, when Lesley Lokko became Dean of Spitzer in December 2019, she had equally transformative ambitions for her new school. Challenging expansive issues of social equity and justice would be all but impossible under a conventional American curriculum, she quickly realized. With its compartmentalized course offerings, “the structure of education in the US works against what the architect does innately,” she explained. “Our training essentially is to bring things together not to fragment them.” As she did successfully at the GSA, Dean Lokko introduced to Spitzer the unit system, a holistic pedagogy based on the yearlong, comprehensive development of a single architectural project, similar to a thesis studio. Subjects like visualization, computation, structures, systems integration, and environmental design are no longer standalone classes but are folded directly into each unit. Pioneered in the 1970s by Alvin Boyarsky, then head of London’s Architectural Association, the unit system remains the bedrock of British architectural pedagogy, including the Bartlett School of Architecture where, in the 1990s, Lokko earned her Diploma in Architecture (a PhD at the University of London followed in 2007). As the GSA’s website explains, Boyarksy “envisioned a holistic ‘learning’ environment (as opposed to a ‘teaching’ environment),” and he got results: Zaha Hadid, Bernard Tschumi, and Rem Koolhaas were among his students. In Lokko’s experience, the unit system fundamentally alters the traditional relationship between those teaching and those being taught, creating a “much closer, more laboratory-like situation where the tutor and the student are co-creating knowledge.”
In South Africa, where students wanted “to say something more than architecture was allowing them,” she recalled, the unit system was liberating. Lokko assumed it would be the same for City College, a similarly public, urban university with one of the most ethnically diverse student bodies in the country. From her perspective as an outsider and a Black woman, she expected America’s unreconciled history of slavery – an “inability to deal with its original sin” – would serve as a bridge between her experience in South Africa and the United States.
That has not panned out.
After nearly a year at Spitzer, Lokko has found “the resistance to change has been much more entrenched and vocal than I could ever have imagined.” Though most of the school’s faculty appears supportive of her reforms, Lokko is not convinced. Faculty resistance has been less one of friction than inertia: “It’s not pushback; it’s incomprehension,” she said. Unlike in South Africa, where pedagogical reform was an implicit ethical obligation, “the faculty fundamentally don’t understand what’s at stake here.” The dean is in a challenging position in a challenging moment: Spitzer is the only publicly funded architecture program in New York City, and her changes come amid simultaneous austerity measures and the transition to remote learning due to the pandemic. As Jerome Haferd, a unit leader for Unit 24, “The Instrumentality of Architecture,” pointed out, Lokko has been pushing the greatest pedagogical transformation among the city’s architecture schools, yet with the fewest resources.
Independent of the faculty, she has also faced resistance from students who, initially excited about the unit system, feared that without dedicated technology courses in digital media or design software they would graduate without the technical skills needed to secure a job. Lokko recognized the legitimacy of their concerns, but described how unreasonably fraught her conversations have been with students, their anger mirroring that of the broader political arena. She remains sympathetic – viewing her students’ anxieties in the context of America’s precarious political situation and ongoing public health crisis – and acknowledged her frame of reference is still the UK, where healthcare is free to all permanent residents: “I don’t know what it is like to live in a context where if something happens to me there’s nothing, there’s no safety net. I can’t project that fear.” As in public health, race is also a factor: Lokko noted the gulf between the concerns of her white faculty and Spitzer’s faculty of color, and observed that Black and brown students remain the most enthusiastic about the promise of her pedagogical vision. “In the US, whenever there’s a problem it fractures along race lines,” she concluded.
Back at the September launch of Noir Radical, Lokko sought to explain to her largely international audience the headwinds she has faced in the US by way of a geopolitical analogy challenging the presumed dynamic between core and periphery, the West and the rest: In contrast to the United States, African nations have been relatively successful controlling the coronavirus—likely attributable to the continent’s combination of youthfulness, effective grassroots messaging, and poverty-driven disease resilience. Evoking America as Africa’s inverse, “if we think about the effect that a combination of tradition, politicking, and abundance might have on a society,” Lokko said, “the axis of power in terms of where genuine innovation may come from suddenly tilts.”
Author’s Note, Appended 1.10.2021: Spitzer Students Respond
Tyler Survant
Subsequent to the original publication of this article, 16 Spitzer M. Arch students led by Giuliana Vaccarino Gearty (M.Arch ’22) publicly responded to Dean Lokko’s statements that race was a factor in her struggles at Spitzer, also reported by Architectural Record, The Architect’s Newspaper, Dezeen, and The Guardian. In a Letter to the Editors, published in NYRA’s November 2020 “Non-Issue 16,” Gearty questions Lokko’s assessment that support for radical change at Spitzer has fallen along racial lines. And in an AR Letter to the Editor, while the students took pains not to deny Dean Lokko’s experience of racism, they disputed her characterization of the school, implying her public statements were misleading or even disingenuous. The Dean’s resignation letter to the student body was “markedly different in tone from the press release she gave to Architectural Record,” the students write. In lieu of race, they said, Lokko cited “health, family, and other personal issues as reasons for her decision.”
As for the Dean’s inability to deliver her vision of pedagogical change, neither letter to the editor addresses the broad, systemic challenges to American architecture education that Lokko has identified. Instead, the students point to local issues of miscommunication and curricular implementation, and to what they see as the Dean’s professional shortcomings as a leader and administrator: “Dean Lokko’s vision of a radical, inclusive, and participatory educational experience was ultimately undermined (at least in part) by her inability to acknowledge the concerns and dreams of her very own students.”
In January 2021, The Royal Institute of British Architects awarded Lesley Lokko the 2020 Annie Spink Award for Excellence in Architectural Education, noting her “impactful leadership, passion and an unwavering commitment to architectural education and research.” Only four Deans out of nearly 100 US schools of architecture identify as Black/African American, according to an August 2020 report by the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA). Dean Lokko officially departs City College at the end of January.
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