Usually representing spirits, ancestors or the primordial couple, these figures were placed in shrines and treated with great respect. Through a wide range of style, scale, belief and function the couples depicted share a timeless, serene equality necessary to the continuity of their societies.

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Embassy of Switzerland in Nairobi / Roeosli Maeder Architects

The Swiss federal office for buildings and logistics recently acquired a piece of land for the construction of a new embassy in the Rosslyn green estate, a residential area just outside the centre of Nairobi

Pavilions For Okana / Laura Katharina Strähle & Ellen Rouwendal

Pavilions for Okana is a Design & Build Project and an interdisciplinary challenge that seeks to make architecture strudents involved in the daily lives of their clients, predominantly focussing on sustainable architecture and narrowing down on cost.

Eco Moyo Education Centre / The Scarcity and Creativity Studio

Eco Moyo is an educational Community Based Organisation located in Ezamoyo in Kilifi county, Kenya, providing free Montessori based education to children from poor families. Eco Moyo have recently bought a 5 hectares site half an hour drive from Kilifi town center. The site has a house, and Eco Moyo is building the infrastructure necessary to make it usable as an education centre.

Award-winning Japanese Architect, Shigeru Ban, signs deal to design new homes for thousands of refugees in Kenya

Renowned Japanese Architect, Shigeru Ban, winner of the 2014 Pritzker Prize, seen as the “Nobel Prize of Architecture,” has signed an agreement to design up to 20,000 new homes for refugees, in the Kalobeyei Refugee Settlement in Kenya.

The Why Not Academy / Gaetano Berni, Ivan Cosentino and Giulia Celentano

The Why Not Academy is a school but above all a multifusion center for the Mabatini community, one of the poorest neighborhoods in the Mathare slum in Nairobi. The school building project takes place in several phases. In the first phase of construction, wooden calls (twin pillars) were left in view of extending the school on a second floor.

Tudor Swahili Gem Apartments / Urko Sanchez Architects

Urko Sanchez Architects releases the newly completed Swahili gem in Tudor creek, a development that explores the complexities of traditional cultural extrapolations and the rigor of environmental comfort within the modern demands of aesthetics. This is a scheme that is terse but pith in the way it handles the elements that it sets out to tackle and ultimately explores the narrow and delicate el...

Akili Towers / Richard Keep and Henry Goss Architects

Akili Tower is a 30 storey mixed use tower in Upper Hill, Nairobi designed by a Richard Keep Architects and Henry Goss Architects collaboration. The proposed site is on the prow of the hill over looking the Uhuru Park and the Central Business District. The shape of the tower is defined by the above ground requirement for car parking which forms the 6 levels separating the lower 3 levels of reta...

Arijiju Resort / Life Grand Group

Arijiju lies on the lowland. The building behaves as though it has always been on that warm stone hillside with living, grassed roofs that move with the air and link into the earth and forest. It is there but not there. Partly sculptured into the rock bed, the subtle entrance opens into a fragrant, greened space with generous Swahili curves and an air of elastic calm. Walls of stone create walk...

Kericho Sacred Heart Cathedral / John McAslan Architects

The Sacred Heart Cathedral of Kericho is located 250 km west of Nairobi, Kenya. It lies within the Highlands, close to the Rift Valley, enjoying magnificent views across tea plantations and surrounding hills.The Cathedral's great inclined roof will become a distinctive form in the rolling panorama of Kericho's hills and valleys when it completes in 2015. Strikingly crafted, the building's simpl...

The Craft School / University Build Collective

The Craft School is an effort by Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology, Technical University of Munich, University of Augsburg at sustainable urban living and technological interplay of materials and aesthetics towards achieving a harmonious and intellectually secure school environment. It is often a challenging aspect in developing countries to convincingly pull across a viabl...

Querol House / Alberto Morell Sixto

The Charley's Gap House in famous' Blixen's famous Karen is a beautiful abstraction of a little Savannah inside a one acre plot. The house, carefully camouflaged by its own façade, an almost bunker response to the street, opens up to the inside into a modular framework that references its own concrete form work. Alberto Morell, himself a seasoned architect and scholar, sort to graduate and qual...

Dalton House / Alberto Morell Sixto

Sometimes architecture is as simple as a sigh, yet portent like the cause of the sigh. It takes a particular process, an integral compounded and labored effort to realize something like that...therein lies the irony. When opinion and fact are blurred and sentiments reserved albeit later shared. That is perhaps what the Dalton House in Kilifi, Kenya's secondary coastal town gently whispers, with...

Red Pepper House / Urko Sanchez Architects

The client, Fernando Torres, wanted a private residence that shared a connection with Lamu but was secluded from the main town itself. He had a passion for architecture and at the same time liked to be in contact with nature. Combining these two attributes, a chance was presented to create a form of organic architecture that had a balance of traditional craft and modern requirements. The client...

Oasis Kindergarten Kibera / Maisha Trust

At the heart of Kibera slums located in Nairobi Kenya sits a small beautiful, well laid out kindergarten school. Kibera, the largest slum in Africa, and one of the biggest in the world, is home to over 250,000 impecunious dwellers. The make-up of Kibera comprises some of the most modest dwelling spaces for any urban set-up, not to mention the capital city of one of the fastest growing economies...

Mahiga Rain Water Court / Dick Clark Architecture + Architecture for Humanity

How can a tree inspire a project? A local of Mahiga, Nyeri county Kenya wanted to plant a tree in the school his child attended, the school needed water to allow the tree to grow, but more importantly to provide clean drinking water to his students. The success of focused learning is through content children, by providing safe clean water to students equates to safe access to sanitation thus pr...

Angama Mara Lodge / Silvio Rech and Lesley Carstens

Silvio Rech and Lesley Carstens have spent the past 20 years developing a hand-crafted haute couture body of work in Africa. Where possible, their design philosophy has been to live onsite (in many instances in exotic locations such as North Island in the Seychelles), managing one project at a time by developing and creating a total design: a new language of architecture and lifestyle specific ...

Lost Villa / Jonathan Woolf Architects

When it comes to conceptualization, context is the foundation of architecture; a building must respond to the site elements of a specific area or location. For a design to be a success, it must strive to meet client needs and at the same time constitute an understanding of the genius loci. When we consider house and contextualism, we are often reminded of our modern forefathers. Closer home, ar...

Konokono Vaccination and Educational Clinic / Selgas Cano and MIT Open Studio Students

Turkana, for anyone who has had the priviledge of travelling there, is a hot and dusty environment, one that among others provides the kind of environment necessary for expansive views, open air movement and natural hard wearing materials. It is with this mindset that Architect José Selgas, of the Spanish firm SelgasCano, worked on the design of a vaccination and educational center for the noma...

St Jerome’s Children's Centre / Orkid Studio

Built with a diverse group from a small Kikuyu community in the rapidly developing agricultural outskirts of Nakuru, Kenya, we have recently completed a new home which will house local disadvantaged and abandoned children. Challenging the typology of the typical African orphanage where children sleep en mass in large dormitories, the new home limits each room to just four children providing amp...

Mahali Mzuri Safari Camp / Real Studios

It is a sight of beauty, a merging of man and nature, a design endeavour that only fans of both architecture and nature "archinatures" can experience in its entirety. Real Studio sort to touch the earth lightly and blend in it with these terracota canvas pieces gently placed onto the Motorogi Conservancy in the Maasai Mara, perhaps one of the most famous wildlife sceneries in the world. And it ...

Karura Forest Environmental Education Centre / Boogertman + Partners.

The winning entry in an open competition to design an environmental education center in the Karura urban forest in Nairobi, Kenya. Located in the northern part of Nairobi County, bordering the Muthaiga, Gigiri and Runda residential areas, the Centre will seek to educate people on the many species of plants, birds, insects and mammals to be found within Karura's diverse landscape.

KE Ochieng/SAOTA

A family home in Nairobi on a site that slopes steeply down towards a river. A series of open interconnected living spaces creates a house that allows the inhabitants to enjoy Nairobi’s mild climate.

French Diplomatic Campus in Nairobi/ TERRENEUVE Architectes

The project design is strongly marked by the antagonism between the high level of security requirements and its home office. The geopolitical context of increasingly unstable and defensive aspects is dominant in most diplomatic designs and heavily constrains development and architecture of this campus which is aimed at expressing the universality of values held by the French culture: openness...

Australian High Commission / Planning Systems Services

Designed in 1987 for the Government of Australia, this building, on Riverside Drive, Nairobi exists entirely as a result of the efforts of Planning Systems Services and the Quantity Surveyors D G Jones. Knowing that the High Commission wished to move out of the City Centre, the two practices identified the Riverside Drive site, introduced the landowners to the High Commission, and negotiated th...

Upeo Camp, Lake Jipe / Urko Sanchez Architects

Most man made features are placed in nature, additions so to speak, but few individuals have developed high levels of empathy to it that they touch nature so lightly. Upeo Camp doesn’t only touch it lightly but rather enhances the existing by imitating and developing it. With two types of units one resembling the existing boulders and the other almost tucked inside the earth one will not even n...

English Point Marina/ Broadway Malyan Architects

The English point marina apartments and gated community has perhaps been in the mouths of all investors and real estate buffs for close to two years now. But what does it have to offer in the architectural scene? It is the region’s first serviced marina to cater for the luxury boating world. English Point Marina is a contemporary development designed by Broadway Malyan, a major international ...

Don Bosco Catholic Church/ Space and Systems Architects

This youth church stands out from the traditional Catholic Church which was more solemn, more linear and with cold colors in a curvilinear, natural lit stepped high volume space that remains true its spirit.

Mtamu Kililo and the Brick by Brick Battle in the Savanna: Voi Community Library

It’s viewed that most traditional buildings and especially in the African continent are sympathetic to the environment they are located in and uses low tech local available materials. However, due to globalization and high technological standards these buildings have been associated with primitivism and branded elementary. In Africa people have universal standards, technology and design that ar...

Dennis Mukuba And The Unbowed Hues of Justice: Meru Judicial Law Courts

Following the Chief Justice word on the need for more spaces and built forms for justice through long term plans of building High Court in each of the new counties defined by the constitution this final year Architecture student at the university of Nairobi decided to come with a court in Meru county that incorporates all the tenents of the modern court but also respects and borrows heavily fro...

Msafiri Mwazighe And The White Fields Of Sustainability: Swahili Cultural Centre

The project is a contemporary approach at modernizing the coastal region and still maintaining the tenets of Swahili architecture. This approach to maintaining the doctrines of Swahili Architecture are however not the main focus in the project as the more dominant project element has been on reacting to climate change within the Coastal region. The design has succeeded in propagating the Swahil...