Anthony W.S.K. Lubega was born in Uganda, in 1931. He was educated at St. Mary's College, Kisubi (1947-52), before attending the Government School of Building and Civil Engineering from 1953-57. During his studies here, he spent periods working for both the African Housing Department and the Ministry of Housing and Labour, in Kampala. Whilst there, he worked as an engineering assistant, supervising site works, surveying and working in the drawing office, on a range of projects including low-cost housing, a community centre, a 5-storey block of flats and the layout of Entebbe Market. In 1960 he won a Uganda Protectorate Government Scholarship to travel to the UK and enroll on the Architectural Association’s (AA) five-year Diploma course, in London. His studies were successful and he was awarded a travelling scholarship in 1964 to study ‘The Changing Pattern of Traditional and Modern Housing in Uganda’. For his final Diploma year, Lubega elected to join the Department of Tropical Architecture programme and successfully graduated in 1965. During the course of his time at the AA he took the opportunity to gain work experience with the London-based practice of Ley Colbeck and Partners (1962) and also with the London County Council Architects' Department – for whom he worked detailing joinery and services for a concert hall. Almost immediately after finishing the AA, Lubega embarked upon a PhD with the University of London, the successful completion of which, in 1969, made him the first Ugandan architect to receive a PhD. He subsequently returned to Uganda and in 1970 served as Senior Architect within Ministry of Works and Housing, in Kampala, soon rising to the position of Chief Architect and Head of Housing and Public Building, representing Uganda on the UN Committee on Housing, Building and Planning in 1975.
Sources
- Architectural Association Student Register, 1945-71. AA Archives
- Architectural Association, Registrar’s Office student records, 1960-66. AA Archives
- Architectural Association Diploma Roll, 1966. AA Archives
- Who’s Who in the United Nations and Related Agencies, Arno Press, 1975, p340
- Habitat: United Nations Conference on Human Settlements, Vancouver, Canada, 31 May – 11 June, 1976. List of Participants, p156. United Nations, 1976.
- Mark Olweny , “The Foreign and the Local in Architectural Education in Late Colonial and PostIndependence East Africa , ” ABE Journal [Online], 22 | 2023, Published December 30, 2023 , accessed November 6, 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/abe/15314; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/abe.15314
