Mae-ling Lokko, an assistant professor in the School of Architecture at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, has been awarded a Future by Design grant from the Architecture Design Fashion division of the British Council, which seeks to builds connections between people in the United Kingdom and other countries through arts, culture, and education.

The Future by Design competition was proposed to inspire and promote a global dialogue around climate change and to highlight radical thinking about the role of design in shaping the future and responding to urgent environmental issues, with a specific focus on amplifying the voices of young people between the ages of 18 and 29.

This summer, Lokko will work in partnership with Scottish architect Tom Morton of Arc Architects to design a hybrid, eco-sustainable, and accessible “open landscape classroom” on the 50-acre site of Cove Park, an international artists’ residency on Scotland’s west coast. They will work with a multidisciplinary cohort of young people from Scotland and Ghana — including students from the Mackintosh School of Architecture in Glasgow and the Ashesi Entrepreneurship Center in Accra — to co-design and co-program spaces that are conducive to knowledge exchange around the impacts of climate change on water.

The project will be featured as part of the cultural programming in the run-up to the United Nations Climate Change Conference of the Parties, which will be held in Glasgow in November 2021.

Lokko, who directs the building sciences program at Rensselaer, has also joined the Queens Museum in Queens, New York, as a Year of Uncertainty (YoU) Co-Thinker. Lokko will be part of a small, international group focusing on a deep reconsideration of museum pedagogy and infrastructure to respond to hyperlocal and international states of precarity that have been heightened by the COVID-19 pandemic, racial injustice, xenophobia, and income disparity.

Lokko will also participate in the Vienna Biennale for Change 2021 Planet Love that opens May 27 in Vienna, Austria. Her work will be showcased as part of an exhibit titled, Ecologies and Politics of the Living, which explores the relationship between animate and inanimate environments against the backdrop of a politically and economically interwoven world, primarily from southern perspectives.