Education & Lectures

Lectures, teaching, and academic appearances by Lex te Loo and the bureau.

Lagos: Observations (2026-06-17T00:00:00+00:00). On 17 June 2026, Lex te Loo gave an open lecture at the MARCH Architecture School in Moscow on the fastest-moving frontier in urbanisation: the new cities of Africa. New capitals, reclaimed coastlines, private mega-projects, free economic zones, gated districts and so-called smart cities are assembling a genuinely new urban condition. The lecture asks a single question. What does the most radical case teach everyone else? The case is Lagos, read not as a draft of the formal city but as a city that converts every withdrawn guarantee into a private substitute. Land is delivered by the dredger. Power is bought generator by generator. Ownership is painted onto a wall. Value migrates from the building to the render. The claim is that this is not Africa's exception. It is a preview of the ordinary urban condition, read first where the guarantees fell first. The recording above is the studio's own edit of the talk. The full reading, in twelve observations, is published as <a href="/think-tank/research/the-subtractive-city">The Subtractive City</a>. It continues as the first season of <a href="/lll/online-sessions">LLL Online</a>, the Laboratory's reading group, which takes Lagos as its subject.
City as Fairy Tale, City as Dream (2025-12-11T00:00:00+00:00). International panel at Moscow Interior and Design Week on new approaches to urban planning and how design shapes the future of urban spaces. The session asks how cities can be made convenient, inspiring, and alive, rather than only efficient. 11 December 2025. Moderated by Elina Klimenko, deputy general director of the Moscow Architecture and Urban Planning Foundation. Lex te Loo's contribution to the panel begins at the 1:11:40 cue point above; the recording opens directly there.
City 2025: Rethinking urban life for the next generations (2025-01-16T00:00:00+00:00). Lex te Loo's lecture at the HSE Creative Hub conference on contemporary urbanism and country house architecture, 16 January 2025. The talk argues that the city of 2025 must be rethought from the ground up if it is to serve the next generation, and treats premium private housing as a typology that can lead this rethink rather than retreat from it. The recording above is auto-cued to the moment the lecture begins. The conference also included a panel discussion on the move from public to private space, with the lecture forming the central proposition the panel argued from.
HSE Creative Hub: Architectural speed dating (2024-07-18T00:00:00+00:00). Lex te Loo joined six other Moscow architects and designers at HSE Creative Hub on 18 July 2024 for an evening of short-form practice talks. Each speaker had roughly ten minutes to outline their philosophy and current work, and to mark the direction in which they think the city should develop. The recording above is auto-cued to the moment Lex's segment begins. Other speakers in the line-up: Yulia Sheremetova (HSE Art and Design School), Alyona Zaitseva (UTRO), Tatiana Ishchuk (CM International), Gulnara Safarova (UNK landscape), Tatiana Belokhina (INTERIOR+DESIGN), Tatiana Valyuvich (Geniy Mesta).