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Olalekan Jeyifous is a Nigerian-born, Brooklyn-based artist and designer. He creates “architectural follies” from bits and pieces of the cities he knows and loves. He received a BArch from Cornell University and is a visual artist whose work has been exhibited at venues such as the Studio Museum in Harlem, the MoMA, the Vitra Design Museum and the Guggenheim in Bilbao. He has recently completed artist residencies with the Headlands Center for the Arts, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, the Drawing Center’s Open Sessions program, and he was a Wilder Green Fellow at the MacDowell Colony. In addition to his extensive exhibition history, he has spent over a decade creating large-scale artwork for a variety of public spaces. He created award-winning installations for Starbucks located in the Barclays Arena in Brooklyn and their Flagship store located in Chicago’s Gold Coast neighbourhood. Most recently, he has completed commissions for the Durham SmART Vision Plan, a 50ft-tall sculpture for the 2017 Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, and 4 large sculptures for Public Square in downtown Cleveland, OH.

This year, the GSA is proud to host a series of prolific local and international architects, practitioners and thinkers for the school's external examinations to be held in November. Kate Otten joins the list - an acclaimed South African architect having completed 160 buildings, some of which include the Women's Gaol at Constitution Hill, Tembisa Community Library, the Centre for Experiential Learning in Booysens, and the recently completed Law on Keyes in Rosebank. Read about Kate's spatial sensitivity, craft and transformative intent in the recent feature in Visi's February/ March Issue - click here for more details!

The first tranche of speakers has been announced for the Australian Institute of Architects’ National Architecture Conference, which will take place in Melbourne from 20 to 22 June. The speakers announced so far are: Lesley Lokko – University of Johannesburg, South Africa Emanuel Admassu – AD-WO, USA Marina Otero Verzier – Het Nieuwe Instituut, Netherlands Marcos Rosello – aLL Design, UK Jen Wood – AD-WO, USA Sarah Lynn Rees – JCB, Australia Jeremy McLeod – Breathe Architecture, Australia Olivia Hyde – Acting Government Architect NSW, Australia Farzin Lotfi-Jam – Farzin Farzin, Australia Dhakshayini Sooriyakumaran – Decolonized Design Australia, Australia Laura Harding – Hill Thalis, Australia Mauro Baracco and Louise Wright – Baracco and Wright Genevieve Murray – Future Method, Australia Joel Sherwood-Spring – Future Method, Australia Libby Porter – RMIT University, Australia Scott Fry – Loving Earth, Australia Cecille Weldon – Centre for Liveability Real Estate Australia. Prof Lesley Lokko is Director at the Graduate School of Architecture at the University of Johannesburg. An architect, academic and author of ten best-selling novels, Lokko is an “on-going contributor to discourses around identity, race, African urbanism and the speculative nature of African architectural space and practice for nearly thirty years.”

Architecture is usually filmed from the outside, as an inanimate object. The few depictions of interiors are usually limited to still or static images of an empty building, reducing it to no more than an icon or sculpture. ‘rem’ uses an unconventional approach by combining the human stories and experience of both the architect and the users of his architecture. The film explores rem’s life, working methods, philosophy and internal landscape, from a never seen perspective of intimacy and immediacy. The result is having the feeling of being ‘inside’ his head. This perspective allows the viewer to understand rem’s ideas in a way they couldn’t otherwise. These ideas are not merely explained as intellectual concepts but the viewer also sees these ideas in practice -the reality on the ground. They see how these ideas come to fruition in concrete and metal. The film shows how these structures, some massive and some small -dotted all around the globe- affect every aspect of the lives of the people that build them, use them and live inside them.

GSA Main, FADA Auditorium, Bunting Road Campus, University of Johannesburg. Wine Bar: 18h00 Welcome Note & Talk: 18:30 – 19:15 Q & A: 19:15 – 19:45 #happeningatthegsa DK Osseo-Asare is co-founding principal of trans-national architecture and integrated design studio Low Design Office (LOWDO), based in Austin, Texas and Tema, Ghana; co-founder of pan-African open tech initiative Agbogbloshie Makerspace Platform (AMP); and Assistant Professor of Architecture and Engineering Design at Penn State University, where he runs the Humanitarian Materials Lab and serves as Associate Director of Penn State’s Alliance for Education, Science, Engineering and Design with Africa. DK led strategic and urban design initiatives for Koumbi City and Anam City, new town projects in Ghana and Nigeria, and his design research spans humanitarian materials, design innovation, open-source urbanism, digital fabrication and architecture robots — exploring how optimised materials assemblies can transform lives and drive radical resilience through buildings, landscapes, cities, objects and digital tools. He is a TED Global Fellow, Africa 4 Tech Digital Champion in EdTech and received A.B. in Engineering Design and M.Arch. degrees from Harvard University.

BBC 4 has just released a 14-minute radio interview on the acclaimed architect, Sir David Adjaye. Listen to the full interview which features Mark Coles in conversation with the artist Chris Ofili, Adjaye's family, President Barack Obama and Prof Lesley Lokko. The full interview can be heard at https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0002g4g. The Design Museum in London has launched an exhibition examining the role of monuments and memorials in the 21st century, and it features seven projects by the British-Ghanaian architect David Adjaye, including a glimpse of some that have yet to be built. The exhibition called Making Memory sets out to show that contemporary monuments are no longer “static” objects – such as plaques, statues or neo-classical sculptures – but dynamic and complex spaces created to serve a wider purpose. Exemplifying that idea will be projects by Adjaye such as the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington DC, the new National Cathedral of Ghana in Accra and the proposed UK Holocaust Memorial and Learning Centre in London. “The monument is no longer a representation, it is an experience of time and place that is available to everyone,” said Adjaye. “Whether it’s for a nation, a race, a community, or a person, it is really used as a device to talk about the many things facing people across the planet.” The show offers a visual survey of monuments and memorials throughout history, beginning with the Acropolis of Athens (447 BC) and continuing through to the 2018 Millicent Fawcett statue by Gillian Wearing in London. Prof Lesley Lokko and Dean Federico Freschi attended the opening on 3 February.