Bartlett Visiting Professor and alumna Lesley Lokko received the award as part of the Architects’ Journal / Architectural Review’s W Awards (formerly Women In Architecture). The award was established in honour of Ada Louise Huxtable, the first full-time architecture critic at a US newspaper. A writer for the New York Times, she won the first Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 1970. She passed away in 2013.

It has been a momentous year for Lesley, who won the 2020 RIBA Annie Spink Award late last year, began to set up postgraduate architecture school African Futures Institute in Ghana at the start of 2021, and also became a Visiting Professor at The Bartlett.

Lesley commented,

Writing matters. Critique matters. Reflection matters. The award is such an affirmation of architecture’s multiple ‘voices’, and a celebration of the way they’re constantly in dialogue with each other.


Lesley trained as an architect at The Bartlett during the 1990s, and completed her PhD at The Bartlett in 2007. In 2014 she founded and led the Graduate School of Architecture at the University of Johannesburg, and has also taught at Iowa State University, University of Illinois, Kingston University, University of Westminster, University of North London and most recently the Spitzer School of Architecture in New York. 

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Image: Debra Hurford-Brown