Watch the full video of the hour-long conversation between Sir David Adjaye and Prof Lesley Lokko held at the RIBA in London last week. Sir David discusses his exceptional career and rise to become one of Time Magazine's '100 most influential people' in the world. In a wide-ranging interview that covers both professional and personal challenges, Sir David explores his design philosophy, the structure and set-up of his practice, his aspirations for architecture to 'do better, be better' and his profound and moving explanation of what it's like to be famous: 'it set me free to be me.' A fascinating insight into a truly outstanding and important talent.

Thiresh Govender is an architect and urban designer practicing in Johannesburg. Having worked in the studios of Noero Wolff and Paragon Architects, he was driven to understand the larger forces shaping architecture and cities in our new democracy. He was awarded the Chevening Scholarship to complete his Master’s in Urban Design at the Bartlett in 2006. Following his intrepid travels to far-away places, he set up UrbanWorks in Johannesburg as a means of exploring the possibilities of practice in an attempt to understand this unwieldy metropolis in terms of its design. He is deeply obsessed with the emergent spatial patterns of the city, specifically its capacity to foster radical new possibilities. He leads Unit 14 at the University of Johannesburg’s Graduate School of Architecture, which investigates the Rogue Economies shaping Johannesburg.

In this performance, Bartlett doctoral student Thandi Loewenson will take the audience on a journey; from the fringes of the real, through the many realms of the weird and settling in a site that is decidedly tender. Through many voices, she will share how developing the story of a weird, fictional city called Mailo – through writing, drawing and performance – is enabling a community of waste pickers and the Lusaka City Council to work together towards producing a tender to manage the city dump site. Mailo is a test of the possibilities of an architectural interpretation of the literary genre of the New Weird; where politically engaged, urban, secondary world fictions are created which draw on real world models and combine elements of science fiction and fantasy.