Design Indaba · Cape Town · February 2019

One of the earliest public articulations of the practice's core position: that architecture does not enter a neutral site but a place already carrying a narrative, and that the built intervention will either honour, distort, or erase that narrative. The talk argues through completed projects in Niger that architecture's most urgent capacity is not formal or technical but narrative and its ability to return dignity, anchor identity, and make a community's story visible in built form.

Watch/Read the lecture here.

University of Johannesburg · August 2019

Delivered at the Graduate School of Architecture at the University of Johannesburg in August 2019, this lecture situates the practice's methodology within the broader context of African architecture education and the questions it has consistently failed to ask. The talk draws on the firm’s projects to argue for an architecture rooted in the material, spatial, and cultural intelligence already present in African cities — developed through sustained engagement with communities, builders, and makers rather than imported from outside.

Watch the lecture here.

MIT · April 2021

Delivered at MIT in April 2021, this lecture develops the argument that the stories a culture holds about its past are the primary material architects work with, whether they acknowledge this or not. An architect who does not read the narrative already present in a place is not working from a neutral position; they are simply working from someone else's story, usually the dominant one. The lecture argues that the discipline has consistently mistaken this borrowed narrative for universality, and that the most urgent task in architecture today is learning to read that narrative before touching the site.

Watch the lecture here.

Alero Olympio Annual Memorial Lecture · Africa Futures Institute · Inaugural lecture · August 2021

This lecture is the origin document for the intellectual framework later named Intersectional Sustainability. Delivered as the inaugural Alero Olympio Annual Memorial Lecture at the Africa Futures Institute in August 2021, it is the first public synthesis of the argument that sustainability in architecture must be understood across four simultaneous dimensions: environmental, social, economic, and cultural. The framework is argued through built and process work in Niger and Senegal, demonstrating through projects that these four dimensions are not competing priorities but a single, indivisible practice.

Watch/Read the lecture here.

Columbia University · October 2021

Delivered at Columbia University in October 2021, this lecture argues that memory — collective, cultural, material — is not a sentimental resource but a precision instrument. Developed through the Dandaji market, the Hikma Community Complex, and the National Black Theatre proposal in Harlem, the talk moves from memory as active design research, to memory as a trap when form is divorced from the structural logic that produced it, to memory as the mechanism through which architecture can move a community forward rather than backward.

Watch the lecture here.

Harvard University · Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture · March 2022

Delivered at Harvard's Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture in March 2022, this lecture addresses the relationship between how architecture is taught and what it enables practitioners to see. This was later explored through the ETH Zurich Chair of Architecture Heritage and Sustainability's three research lines — dismantling, unarchiving, and refusing — it argues that the inherited frameworks of architectural education systematically exclude the forms of knowledge most needed for building justly in the Global South, and that a genuinely equitable architecture requires not just new projects but new pedagogical conditions.

Watch the lecture here.

IASS Keynote · ETH Zurich · 2024

Delivered as a keynote at the International Association for Shell and Spatial Structures conference at ETH Zurich in 2024, this lecture is the most recent full public statement of the Intersectional Sustainability methodology. Argued through a decade of completed work across Niger, Senegal, Liberia, and the Gulf, it demonstrates that the material and climatic constraints of building in economically vulnerable contexts are not limitations to be overcome but the primary generative conditions of the work. The lecture shows how scarcity — of budget, of imported materials, of mechanical infrastructure — consistently produces architecture of greater environmental, social, economic, and cultural integrity than resource-abundant alternatives.

Watch/Read the lecture here.

The World Around Summit · MoMA, New York · April 2026

Delivered at The World Around Summit at MoMA in April 2026, this keynote introduced Architecture of Repair as a named methodology, distinct from restoration, which attempts to return to an original state, and from reconciliation, which smooths over difference. Repair, as argued here, is a practice that acknowledges what was broken and builds forward from rootedness: from the knowledge, materials, spatial logics, and social structures already present in a place before the rupture. The lecture develops the argument through three projects: the Bët-bi Museum in Senegal; the Unarchiving research tool at ETH Zurich; and the Bura Artifacts Restitution commission.

Watch the lecture here.