‘Intersections with things like race, class, power: they’re fundamental, they’re not peripheral at all’: Lesley Lokko’s AR Bookshelf

The AR Bookshelf is a podcast by The Architectural Review. The idea is very simple: we ask each guest to put books on an imaginary bookshelf and tell us their story.

Lesley Lokko talks to the AR about the books on her bookshelf, from Reni Eddo-Lodge and Nadine Gordimer to Rem Koolhaas and Hello magazine. We discuss corporate Black Lives Matter statements, bad book covers, and the truth found in fiction.

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Newly Dean of the Spitzer School of Architecture at The City College of New York, Lesley Lokko previously established the Graduate School of Architecture at the University of Johannesburg, Africa’s first and only dedicated post-graduate school of architecture. Born in Scotland, growing up in Ghana and studying architecture at the Bartlett and the University of London, Lokko pursues, among many other things, the subject of ‘race’ and architecture and the city, publishing White Papers, Black Marks: Race, Space & Architecture in 2000, as well as having a career as a best-selling fiction writer. Lokko has also appeared in the pages of the AR, writing about the damage of Africa’s development-aid-charity paradigm, the remittance economy, the ways protests can shift the axes of power, and most recently about the democracy of shade.

Lesley Lokko’s AR Bookshelf bibliography:

Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race, Reni Eddo-Lodge, 2017
Mutations, Rem Koolhaas, Stefano Boeri, Sanford Kwinter, Nadia Tazi, Hans-Ulrich Obrist, 2001
Third Text, art journal
The New Education, Cathy Davidson, 2017
July’s People, Nadine Gordimer, 1981
Remembering Babylon, David Malouf, 1993
The Dry Heart, Natalia Ginzburg, 1947 (reprinted 2019 with a cover by Pablo Delcan)
American Dirt, Jeanine Cummins, 2020
The Overstory, Richard Powers, 2018
Hello magazine
A Sport of Nature, Nadine Gordimer, 1987
Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison, 1977
Sula, Toni Morrison, 1973
The Great World, David Malouf, 1990
Lace, Shirley Conran, 1983

The book everyone should read about racism:

Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race, Reni Eddo-Lodge, 2017

It’s about the burden of being the raced person who must explain it to others. There’s a way in which race is always thought of as someone else’s issue – and it’s usually the issue for Black and brown people.

The book you would give to an architecture student:

Mutations, Rem Koolhaas, Stefano Boeri, Sanford Kwinter, Nadia Tazi, Hans-Ulrich Obrist, 2001

It’s been twenty years since I read this book, and each time I find something new in it: it is surprisingly prescient as well as relevant. People critique Koolhaas endlessly for being glib or superficial, but for me it remains one of the most interesting – maybe not the most important – texts. There was very little for me as an architecture student that made any sense with the world I had come from. I remember looking at Bannister Fletcher – and there is no Africa on the tree – and thinking, ‘this clearly isn’t speaking to me’.

The book you wish you hadn’t read (or perhaps which made difficult reading):

The New Education, Cathy Davidson, 2017

I’m struggling to push through curriculum changes in the US at the moment, which is one of the hardest places to enact change. Reading this amazing book made me angry: angry at the slow, stubborn pace of change which is in direct contrast to the oft-professed appetite for it. Like history, school curricula didn’t roll off the mountain with Moses; there’s a reason why things are set up. Canon is not biblical, we made it.

What was the book that changed your mind about fiction:

July’s People, Nadine Gordimer, 1981

I didn’t know fiction could deal with issues of race creatively as well as politically. I read this book when I was about 17 and it changed my life. I became a fiction writer because of Gordimer. In many ways, the work I do as an educator is because of her – seeing ‘race’ as a creative, rich and expressive category of enquiry, not just a ‘problem’ to be solved. Fiction is truth in a very particular way.

The book you wish you’d written:

Remembering Babylon, David Malouf, 1993

I ‘discovered’ Malouf when I was in my early twenties and realised that the same issues of race and identity could be written about in almost every country, every culture, every context. It also deals with the hybrid: the person who is neither fully in one world or another. That had enormous resonance for me, growing up in between cultures (Ghanaian/British). I realised hybrids are everywhere.

The book whose cover you would have on your wall:

The Dry Heart, Natalia Ginzburg, 1947 (reprinted 2019 with a cover by Pablo Delcan)

The last book you read:

American Dirt, Jeanine Cummins, 2020

The next book you will read:

The Overstory, Richard Powers, 2018

The book no one can ever know I’ve read is:

Hello magazine, every week. You can learn a lot about the world from Hello.

The five books you would save from the bonfire:

July’s Peopl e, Nadine Gordimer, 1981
A Sport of Nature, Nadine Gordimer, 1987
Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison, 1977 or Sula, Toni Morrison, 1973
The Great World, David Malouf, 1990
Lace, Shirley Conran, 1983