In recent years, the landscape of architectural education has been reshaped by voices demanding relevance, diversity, and radical creativity. Standing firmly at the forefront of this transformation is Lesley Lokko, the Scottish‑Ghanaian architect, academic, and writer whose pioneering work has disrupted traditional Eurocentric pedagogy. With the launch of the Nomadic African Studio under the African Futures Institute, Lokko unveils a visionary programme designed not just to teach architecture—but to rethink it.
Her journey to this point intertwines personal narrative with professional triumph. Raised between Accra and Scotland, Lokko always felt architecture in the Global North failed to mirror her lived experiences. She has described learning the profession in London in the 1990s as a confrontation—taught to separate interiors from exteriors, to ignore communal living patterns familiar from her childhood in Ghana, to build with materials unsuited to tropical climates. That sense of incongruence fueled her mission to create architectural dialogues rooted in African realities.
With accolades like the RIBA Royal Gold Medal in 2024 and a historic role as the first Black curator of the Venice Architecture Biennale, Lokko has leveraged her influence to advocate for equitable representation and a decolonised curriculum. These honours enabled her to co‑found the African Futures Institute (AFI) in 2021—a think tank and educational platform headquartered in Accra, aimed at teaching, research and public discourse . Now, its flagship initiative, the Nomadic African Studio, has begun its journey.
Breaking the Mold with Nomadic Workshops
Rather than replicate a fixed architecture school, Lokko chose a bold, itinerant model: a series of fully funded, month‑long studios held in different African cities, starting summer 2025 in Fez, Morocco. This mobile format reflects the themes of each city—Fez, for example, with its “ambiguous territory” bridging Africa and the Arab world, serves as a fertile ground to explore identity, cultural overlaps, and urban tradition.
Designed for participants under 35, with over half from Africa and many from its diaspora, the workshops aim to redefine architectural thinking—not focused solely on creating buildings, but on cultivating critical imagination, confidence, and creative agency. Working in small, thematic groups—on challenges like climate migration or identity—the participants are encouraged to produce not only models, but films, performances, speculative essays, and manifestos.
During the Venice Biennale, Lokko famously called Africa the “Laboratory of the Future,” stressing that the continent has long experienced rapid change and complex urban conditions that many regions are only now encountering. Nomadic African Studio puts that laboratory into practice—by mobilising creative energy where it matters most.
Lives Transformed Through Architecture
This initiative is already changing people’s lives. Take Aminata from Dakar, who attended AFI events in Accra and felt reignited. She shares how she once considered a conventional path—emigrating to Europe for studies—but found her passion for homegrown design renewed by the studio’s emphasis on local materials and vernacular knowledge. Working on a pilot module in Fez, she designed a prototype for a rainwater harvesting courtyard shaded by traditional tadelakt-domed pavilions—a solution rooted in place yet forward-looking.
Or consider Samuel from Nairobi, who recounts the moment a visiting nomad-panelist encouraged him to frame informal settlements not as problems but as fertile grounds of architectural invention. That shift in perspective struck him deeply: architecture, he realised, was not only about aesthetics or tradition, but about addressing urgent human realities with compassion and creativity.
Funding from bodies like Open Society Foundations and support from partners such as Rolex underscores the growing appetite for such programmes that fuse architectural innovation with African futures. Finance is crucial, but equally important is the studio’s lived impact: participants tell stories of rediscovered cultural confidence and sharpened voices capable of articulating local needs in global discourse.
Connecting Across Contexts
The nomadic format doesn’t just bring designers to new cities—it brings cities into conversation with each other. Planned studios in Abidjan, Johannesburg, Accra and Port Louis are curated to reflect contextual themes—urban informality in West Africa, deindustrialisation in South Africa, coastal resilience on island territories. Each city becomes a node of shared exploration, connecting voices across regions, creating a network of emergent thinkers tackling shared challenges.
This sense of interconnectedness counters architectural isolation. Lokko observes that most architecture schools in Africa are under 90; western curricula still dominate. Nomadic African Studio makes learning mobile, contextual, interdisciplinary, and rooted in lived African futures.
Rethinking Architectural Education
The project also questions how architecture is taught. Too often, education is exam- and output- driven—students produce polished models, portfolios of finished buildings. Lokko criticises this as reductive. Instead, Nomadic African Studio values the process: how one thinks, experiments, assembles knowledge from materials, social conditions, memory, climate, poetic imagination.
Expect some messy floors strewn with drawings, spirited late-night debates, visits to local artisans, site interventions in informal communities. These become laboratories of learning in multiple senses—emotional, physical, intellectual, collective. And they’re already inspiring new models in architectural pedagogy: “What if every architecture school took its students to live on‑site for a season” asks one Accra alumnus in conversation with his peers?
A Movement Rooted in Purpose
At its core, Nomadic African Studio is more than workshops—it is civic architecture in motion. It nurtures networks of thinkers who can craft policy briefs, public installations, community prototypes, critical manifestos—transforming space and society from within. Lokko herself has said that with enough momentum over five years, this model might serve as the foundation for a new form of pan‑African school .
Young people report a newfound sense of responsibility—to heritage and future. Participants speak of forging alliances with local authorities after presenting proposals for adaptive reuse of historic buildings or new community hubs. They’re not just designing; they are stepping into roles as civic activists and storytellers, championing African solutions for African challenges.
Echoes Beyond the Studio
The ripples of Lokko’s work can already be felt beyond academia. Conversations at the Biennale, at the Nomadic Studio, and in policy summits are reframing Africa from a site of crisis to a source of architectural innovation. Urban planners in Lagos, engineers in Cairo, ministers in Cape Town—they are now referencing insights generated by this itinerant programme.
In design schools worldwide, the model inspires pedagogical shifts: incorporating field-based semesters, local partnerships, community‑led ideation. And for young architects engaging with issues like climate adaptation, cultural continuity, migration housing, water‑sensitive design, the nomadic approach offers a replicable template—responsive, socially embedded, idea‑driven.
Lesley Lokko’s Nomadic African Studio is more than an educational endeavour—it is a catalytic journey shaping a new generation of African architects attuned to context, capable of imagining futures in flows across the continent. Through grounded story, collective belonging, and creative agency, this initiative lights a path where architecture extends far beyond buildings to become a mode of shared possibility and transformation.