Prof Lesley Lokko, Associate Professor of Architecture and the Director of Graduate Programme (GPA) at the University of Johannesburg (UJ), will be a keynote speaker at the prestigious, international peer-reviewed Association of Architectural Educators (AAE) conference in April 2016.

The AAE2016 conference on research-based education will run from 7 to 9 April 2016 as part of Bartlett 175 – an exciting series of events celebrating the 175 years of architectural education at UCL, hosted by The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, in collaboration with AAE.

The conference will look to bring together global innovators in education, research and practice to interrogate the diverse natures and inter-relationships between these realms as they relate to architecture – and to discuss how and why they may evolve.

Prof Lokko, an alumnus of the Bartlett School of Architecture, will join fellow keynote speakers Achim Menges, professor at the University of Stuttgart; Izaskun Chinchilla Moreno, who has taught at UCL and ETSAM; and Etienne Wenger-Trayner, who is a social learning theory expert.

It will include sessions on the key themes of curiosity, risk, participation and production, and the conference is seeking papers of 3,000 to 6,000 words that address aspects of one or more of these themes. Prof Lokko will be speaking about the notion of ‘risk’ in architectural education, and specifically about the new think tank about to be launched in the Postgraduate School of Architecture at UJ, Transformative Pedagogies. This exciting new development underscores the School’s commitment to the transformation of the canon of architectural education.

Prof Lokko is the director of the UJ’s Postgraduate School of Architecture (PGSA) . In 2015, PGSA became the first School of Architecture on the African continent to run the world-famous Unit System of architectural education, first developed at London’s Architectural Association in the 1970s. The Unit System allows for multiple approaches towards architecture and urbanism, creating a genuine laboratory of experimentation and innovation. In 2015, there were three Units on offer; in 2016, on the basis of a massive jump in applications, students will be able to choose from five Units, each offering a wide range of perspectives and positions.