From Right: Kabage Karanja: Architect - Founder + Director, Priscillah Msafari - Administration Manager, Kevin Mwangi - Designer + photography consultant, Stella Mutegi: Architect - Founder + Director, Mtamu Kililo - Architect + Material research consultant.

We are a Nairobi based bureau of architects and researchers charting explorations into architecture and urbanism within nature. Our work addresses the anthropological and geological context of the African city as a means to confront the complexities of our contemporary rural and urban lives. 

The bureau is driven to develop systems and structures that improve the human condition, without negatively impacting the natural environment and social fabric of our communities. We navigate a return to the limitless curiosity of our early ancestors, conducting playful and intensive research studies into caves within and around Nairobi. These studies form part of a broader decoding of pre and post colonial conditions of the city, explored through drawing, storytelling, construction, and the curation of performative events of resistance.

We also work to reconcile the often disjointed linkage between academia and practice by engaging multiple schools of architecture and studios around the world, where we lecture and review student work. Our evolving objective here being to better bridge the uneasy gap between these two standpoints, especially from our African position. 

Our ground-mending history

“The Fabian Colonial Bureau was founded in 1940, and was the first of such groups that provided the British Labour MPs with the research, networking, and publications necessary to influence the nature of British colonial rule throughout the empire. By the early 1950s though, there was a shift in British anticolonial organizations as the opposition began forming movements to more stridently challenge Churchill’s Conservative government. The African Bureau, established in 1952, represented significant departures from the original Fabian Colonial Bureau. It sought to influence the direction of colonial development policies, and to expose the injustices of colonialism and bring the anachronistic form of governance to an end. The Second World War brought vast changes to Kenya, changes that exposed the inequities of British colonial rule, galvanizing indigenous discontent and channeled it into a mass resistance movement that would be called Mau Mau”. [ Caroline Elkins, Britain’s Gulag ].

These movements of resistance not limited to Kenya were always orchestrated from the rural hinterlands of natural systems such as forests, caves, valleys, and mountains, constantly in tension with the disjointed colonial towns and cities. So by definition the post colonial African city cannot be fully understood without the past and present realities of the rural backdrop, a friction of what we call rural-urbanity.

At Cave_bureau we underscore and root this heritage without any political allegiances, and instead from a geological and indigenous alliance, confronting the neoliberalist permutations of colonialism and environmental degradation that persists today. We craft strategies across rural and urban lands, confronting these forces creatively with the communities that inhabit them. It is by design that this dark and yet rich history is not taught in schools, both by former colonised and colonising states, in any great depth or complexity. While within academia and architectural practice this past has only recently been given attention when speaking about the rich future of the African city or what extends beyond it. To this end or indeed beginning, we have embarked on an ongoing journey to investigate and integrate this history within architectural research, pedagogy and practice, to literally mend the ground as well as our imaginations when addressing the conjoined efforts to both decolonise and decarbonise Africa’s rural and urban territories.

Kabage Karanja (riba)

HUNTER - EXPLORER

Kabage is a co-founder and director of Cave_bureau, starting the practice in 2014 alongside Stella Mutegi.

He is a natural environment enthusiast leading geological and anthropological investigations into architecture and nature, synonymous with the bureau’s work. He heads the research, and aesthetic direction, orchestrating expeditions and surveys into caves within the Great Rift Valley, navigating a return to the limitless curiosity of our early ancestors.

These playful and intensive research studies form part of a broader decoding of the pre and post-colonial African city, where he oversees the bureau’s work that manifests through drawing, storytelling, construction, and the curation of performative events of resistance within caves.

As a UK qualified architect since 2011, he has worked at Symbion in Kenya, 3DReid

Architects in Central London, Quay-2Cs Architects, in, Peckham, London, and Bohn & Viljoen Architects, in Dulwich, London. 

Kabage studied at Loughborough University, Brighton University, Westminster University, and Kingston University where he completed his architectural education, qualifying as an Architect under the Royal Institute of British Architects (riba).

He writes on architecture and is regularly invited to review student work in universities around the world. He is currently an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture Planning & Preservation.

Kabage is a serial sketcher and story teller, driven to script and communicate cave thinking surrounding the built and natural environment.

Stella Mutegi (maaka)

MATRI (ARCH)

Stella is a co-founder and director of Cave_bureau, starting the practice in 2014 alongside Kabage Karanja. Her pragmatic and yet lateral attention to detail complements her wide breadth of experience in the creative and delivery phases of our projects.

She heads the technical department at Cave, where she orchestrates the seamless coordination of our ideas into built form. Stella is well known in the office as the problem slayer of all design issues. She is able to solve all manner of design related challenges with mind boggling ease. helping steer the geological and anthropological investigations towards architectural product.

She partakes in the Cave_bureau expeditions and surveys into caves within the Great Rift Valley, navigating a return to the limitless curiosity of our early ancestors.

She also interrogates the playful and intensive research studies that form part of a broader decoding of the pre and post-colonial African city.

A Kenyan qualified architect since 2009; Stella has worked at Symbion Kenya, Dimensions Architects, and Interior Designers in Kenya.

Stella studied at University of Newcastle in Australia where she completed her architectural education, before returning back home to Kenya.

She then qualified as an Architect under the Board of Registration of Architects & Quantity Surveyors (BORAQS) and is a member of the Architectural Association of Kenya.

She is currently an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture Planning & Preservation.