
For 2024 RIBA Gold Medal recipient Lesley Lokko, 2023 was an amazing year. The Ghanaian-Scottish architect, educator, author and curator delivered the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale to great acclaim (including her main show, themed Laboratory of the Future); she worked on launching from scratch the Africa Futures Institute (AFI), a pioneering architecture research institute and school; and continued with her fiction writing, with a new book coming out soon.
Her pursuits were not only fruitful and critically acclaimed feats in their own right. They also put her in the spotlight for 'democratising architecture'. As announced earlier in January 2024, she has been hailed by the 2024 RIBA Honours Committee as a 'clarion call for equitable representation in policies, planning, and design that shape our spaces'.