Architecture and us

In the mid-1990s, Jeremy Myerson, then Professor of Contemporary Design at De Montfort University in Leicester, England, said – quite off-handedly – that “to understand design, study architecture” during a MA Design & Manufacture course I was attending there at the time. He was using ‘design’ in the context of graphic, fashion, product, industrial, communication, interactive media, environmental, architectural and allied disciplines. It was a simple yet profound statement and because these design activities are in the realm of cultural production – alongside visual and performing art, literature, crafts and the like – the corollary to this advise has implications on the quality of architecture and what it says about the society which designs it, builds it and tolerates it.

The African Design Magazine edited by Gregg Cocking and published in South Africa showcases architectural projects from around the continent and further afield which display attributes of what good design in this structural manifestation should encapsulate – consideration of physical and cultural context, mindful of users, appropriate in terms of construction materials and the building’s purpose, innovative especially in restating what a building ought to be or should look like and aesthetically pleasant among other factors.

If we tick off these attributes when looking at what has been built around us, we should come to the conclusion that design – in all its manifestations – is in competent hands and that the quality of Kenya’s cultural products reflect a creative society with tasteful standards, a people attentive to aesthetics, context, materials, purpose and users.

Which brings me to Ncece Lodge in Nanyuki, Laikipia County, Kenya. Up until around 2014, this was the tallest building – six floors in all – in this town of about 30,000 inhabitants. It still dominates one end of the town’s main street, houses on its ground floor one of the busiest supermarkets in town and stands at the junction of Kenyatta Highway and Laikipia Road which leads to the Kenya Air Force (KAF) and British Army Training Unit in Kenya (BATUK) military bases for which Nanyuki is best known for. As such, if we are to understand design in Laikipia – and Kenya in general – this building is an appropriate architectural specimen to study due to it local prominence, stature and pioneering spirit.

Ncece Lodge in Nanyuki, Laikipia County, Kenya: buildings in Kenya don’t come more ugly than this one and what this says about us as a society is more profound and far-reaching than what this edifice suggests about the state of architecture in Kenya. (Photo by author)

Let's just take its windows and exterior and see how Nanyuki’s ‘Twin Towers’ stacks up with regard to one of those 'good design' attributes – the one concerning aesthetics which asks the question, “is it appealing or beautiful?” I choose aesthetics because there is evidence that when architects pay attention to a building’s context, materials, purpose and its users, the structure ends up looking good, an outcome captured in the well-worn dictum, “form follows function.”

This building has up to six different window shapes and sizes – what purpose does this variation serve? Certainly not an aesthetic one given the visual assault that this variety delivers to the horizontal order of the structure. The windows also do not align vertically, adding to more visual noise. This clutter is magnified in the lower parts of the towers which appear to have a more polished, outer finish, suggesting that had this work been completed to the top, the overall structural dissonance would have been more pronounced.

There are three rectangular protrusions, one on the bottom left, the other in the middle between the towers and the other on top of the left tower. These structures, because of their angular shapes, are unsympathetic to the dominant cylindrical form of the towers and add to more visual noise. The one on top of the left tower holds two cylindrical plastic water tanks – why build rectangular housing for cylindrical tanks? Why does what appears to be an air vent or drainage pipe run halfway up/down one tower then cross over to the next and continue on its journey?

We could pose more questions but even from an ever-so-brief visual examination of Ncece Lodge, we observe a building with no outer rhythm and whose ugliness is a result of irrationality – this building just does not make design sense. If form follows function, we would expect that the interior to be just as disorderly; it is no wonder that the towers appear uninhabited yet the lodge has been standing at that corner for about two decades which suggests it also does not make financial sense. 

If we accept that the cultural products of a society reflect its tastes, inclinations and preferences, then Ncece Lodge displays how loud, vulgar and pretentious Laikipia in particular and Kenya in general can be, national characteristics which we witness all too often on our roads, within our homes, malls, trading centres and stadiums and in our politics. Our built environment is a reflection of us. 

A confluence of ideals and abilities: reflecting upon the Acumen Fellowship year

Scene setting
A population boom in a country with underdeveloped, and hence underproductive, rural areas and inhospitable and overcrowded cities and towns will be an unforgiving reality for Kenya in the next 10-15 years. Envisage 65 million people from the current 46m, 70% of whom will be living in urban centres characterised by “idle and poorly educated youth living in sprawling urban [slums]” as described by Nick Wachira in an article in the journal Kenyan Affairs in which he paints the population picture of Kenya in 2025 and beyond. He goes on to add that, “[even] though the basic human development indicators are projected to improve, the alleviation of mass poverty and suffering will just be marginal.” It is ironic that the article, published in 2011, is titled "Pathway to Development."

It is likely that this scenario will play out in other Eastern Africa countries given the population forecasts - Burundi reaching 17m in 2030 from the current 11m, Ethiopia 138m from 99m, Rwanda 16m from 11.6m, Tanzania 83m from 53.5m and Uganda 62m from 39m (source: World Population Prospects, 2015 Revision). 

Migration mitigation
Rural-to-urban flight is driven primarily by the lack of employment, occupational and entrepreneurial opportunities in the former and the perception that these are available and abundant in the latter. This migration is made more justifiable by the general state of rural areas which are characterised by poor-quality built environments, degraded natural ecosystems and hard-to-reach and often inferior-quality services including education, health, transport and recreation. This phenomenon – moving out of tough, unyielding rural areas to urban centres which under-deliver on their promise of a better life – is what could result in the marginal improvement of living standards over the next decade. We at the Tafaria cHub (creative hub), based at Tafaria Castle in rural Nyandarua County, Kenya, looked at this picture and did not like what we saw. We were also convinced that these negative outcomes were not inevitable.

One of the ways to counteract this trend is to make rural areas anything but what is described above. Rural areas can be aesthetically pleasing; one just has to travel to the English countryside to see how nature can be sculptured to beautiful effect. They can be sites for alternative occupational pursuits and unconventional employment and entrepreneurial opportunities – the creative and cultural industries (visual and performing arts, writing and publishing, audio-visual media production, design and other creative services, traditional cultural expression and heritage etc.) – being examples of such avenues. Integrating these twin objectives into the physical and social fabric of the particular site can produce iconic architecture and hospitable, inviting environments – Tafaria Castle and the many lodges spread around the country’s game parks, reserves and conservancies are examples of this adaptation. The aim would be to develop an alternative rural narrative in which beauty and opportunity are deployed as anchors for population retention and rural revitalisation.

Acumen arrives
The challenge we faced at cHub, which is run by the Tafaria Foundation in partnership with Kuona Trust, was integrating social good with commercial imperatives while bearing above aim in mind. Acumen is one of the better places to learn how this can be successfully accomplished. Acumen’s social investments are geared towards tackling poverty through market solutions. In her book, The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World published in 2009, Acumen’s founder Jacqueline Novogratz describes how she identified this sweet spot, halfway between charity on the one hand and markets on the other, which she called “patient capital”.

The Acumen Fellowship, which I attended in 2015, has helped cHub travel this route. The Fellowship begins with a series of readings which demonstrate that many people before us have imagined a better world and contemplated the consequences of an unjust and an unequal one; to use a phrase from Acumen’s manifesto, these philosophers, writers and politicians – Plato, Gandhi, Mandela, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Hobbes, Ibn Khaldun, Martin Luther King, China Achebe, Aung San Suu Kyi, Lee Kuan Yew, Amartya Sen and others – have had “the audacity to imagine the world as it could be.” It helped that Jacqueline Novogratz facilitated these readings in person.

 

Acumen Founder and CEO Jacqueline Novogratz receiving a gift from an East Africa Fellow, Anthony Mulli, the designer of the necklace he is putting around her neck. His social enterprise, Katchy Kollections, which he set up at the age of 16, employs women from Nairobi's slum areas who produce handcrafted fashion-wear and travel accessories for sale; this helps the women improve their circumstances while maintaining the commercial viability of the firm (picture by the author).

Lifelong learning
As suggested earlier, it was similar idealism which allowed cHub to look at the grim predictions enumerated at the beginning of this article and conclude that the consequences were avoidable. A useful operational framework of getting to the real work was provided via a seminar on Adaptive Leadership which distinguishes tough challenges from technical problems. Getting assignments done or projects going is often stymied by a myopic focus on mundane issues whose resolution is as easy as turning on a light bulb. This is work-avoidance but as soon as you determine what the essential task is – the adaptive challenge – you should be on our way and with a little help from the rest of the seminars, informatively so.

I am both a market researcher and information designer. As a researcher, the imperative to involve users for who you are creating or modifying a service or product comes naturally but as a designer, this is not normal practice – creatives think they know what users, viewers or audiences want and rarely involve them when developing ideas or fashioning products. Human-Centred Design (HCD) is a tool which brings research practice into the design process. The prototyping phase of HCD was the most amenable to a creative like me – we love building stuff and are pretty good at it too; as such, distilling a complex, social enterprise idea into a minimum viable product and testing the prototype among potential users, viewers and audiences demonstrated the ease with which research and design, the new R&D, could come together with beneficial effect.

On a personal, pedagogic level, this has been the singular reminder: I began the Fellowship just before I turned 51 years; I have a PhD in Visual Communication; I have taught design courses at universities in Kenya, United Kingdom and South Africa since the mid-1990s; I have served research clients from these countries on assignments in many parts of Sub-Saharan Africa since 1999; yet, it has been invigorating and humbling and sobering to gain the knowledge and understanding and courage to go forth and do 'the work'; if there was any proof required to signify that learning is a lifelong undertaking, the Fellowship has delivered on this.

Global goals
The fuller benefit of the Fellowship, however, has been its ability to engender "moral imagination: the humility to see the world as it is, and the audacity to imagine the world as it could be," tempered by the realities of placing plans, projects and programmes within social, economic, cultural, ecological, ethical and technological contexts. For example, the seminars on Design Thinking, Theory of Change and Systems Thinking introduced frameworks for assessing social impact; Design Thinking is a discourse which recognises design as a problem-solving endeavour – it was from Design Thinking that Human-Centred Design emerged, in effect putting people at the centre of what we do; Theory of Change tests assumptions made about the predicted or anticipated impact of a social investment while Systems Thinking projects the investment's effect on the wider society.

I have attempted to demonstrate the fulsomeness and utility of the Acumen Fellowship especially as it relates to an audacious idea, the problem which it is attempting to solve and the leverage of existing knowledge: a confluence of ideals and abilities. I have observed the same convergence among my fellow East Africa Fellows which goes to show the open-minded, albeit rigorous, nature of Acumen's selection process, which it must maintain if it is to build the next generation of social sector leaders, this being the goal of Acumen's regional and global Fellowship programmes.

Tafaria Castle: architecture as a metaphor for social, economic and environmental conquest

When one comes upon Tafaria Castle, there is a sense of incredulity – what is a European medieval building doing in rural Kenya? The structure is not very large but its location at the crest of a long climb, which goes on towards the Aberdare Range, makes it imposing. The land surrounding the castle was once a white-owned ranch during Kenya’s colonial period but has now been settled by many Kenyan families including that of the castle's owner. It is his life’s story that lends meaning to the architecture of Tafaria Castle.

Tafaria Castle - the Aberdare Range is in the background (photo by the author)

George Tafaria Waititu’s family settled in the area in 1980, the pioneer Africans to do so, when he had just began school. One of nine siblings brought up by a single mother, he spent his early years here, walking to and from school, herding livestock, fetching water and doing the chores expected of most rural folk. Being the only life he knew, growing up was fun and there was plenty of time to play and dream, notwithstanding the modest home, physical exertion and remoteness of the area. “We had a lot of dreams and amazingly, we always dreamt of wanting to transform or change this place, never mind that one would have no idea how that would be done,” he told me during an interview in 2012, a few months before the opening.

I had just returned to Nairobi from a visit to the construction site and that incredulity had driven me ask for an explanation of what he was building and why. There was no doubt that a lot of thinking had gone into the design of the main and surrounding buildings and grounds but the medieval theme seemed totally out of place.

Kenya is not known for good architecture; the country is strewn with pretentious mimicry and frankly ugly and dangerous buildings. One just needs to visit the financial and corporate heartland of Upper Hill, Nairobi, to see the uglification of Kenya. In the lower part of that hill, at the corner of Bunyala and Lower Hill Roads, stand two of the most hideous edifices – the Co-op Trust Tower and Imperial Bank Building. You would have thought that after Kencom House, a battleship run aground smack in the middle of the city in 1978, we would have hit the bottom of the creative trough especially when this monstrosity is seen against the iconic Kenyatta International Conference Centre of five years earlier; but these two more recent buildings and many more coming up around the country illustrate that we are not done yet.

It has not always been this way. Two recent books, A brief tour of the buildings of Nairobi by Yuko Iwatani and Evelyne Wanjiku, self-published in 2010, and Nairobi in pictures: political icons 1899-2000 by Dr. Lydia Muthuma, published by Focus Publications in 2013, illustrate that poor architectural taste is a contemporary Kenyan affliction – we were designing much better up to around 1981 when the elegant Co-operative House in Nairobi was completed. There have been a few exceptions since – the Coca-Cola Building (2008) and Geminia Insurance Plaza (2008) in Upper Hill are notable departures from this downward spiral but one just has to be confronted by Nation Centre (1991) and the I&M Bank Tower (2001) in the city centre to be reminded of this persistent condition. As such, when you come face to face with Tafaria Castle, the instinct is to see it in light of this trend.

A metaphor is when you appropriate a discourse and apply it in a new or unfamiliar context, for example, using road traffic symbols to illustrate the route to good health; here, the road signs become metaphors for wellbeing. Such rhetorical devices are used to present something in a new and refreshing way with the objective of creating impact and ultimately to persuade. This is the lens through which an appreciation of Tafaria Castle is made possible.

Castles are a European invention, dating back to the 10^th century and originally built as fortified defences. They were usually erected after an area had been conquered and due to this military origin, their prevalence is a historical marker of warfare. Waititu’s dream is to transform the “harsh” environment he grew up in. His means is not war but rather, social, economic and environmental investments with the aim of improving human and physical conditions. Tafaria Castle is the symbol of this intention – the mark of social, economic and environmental conquest; when viewed in this manner, it no longer appears out of place.

Making sense of Telkom Kenya’s market failures

A lot has been written about the troubles at Telkom Kenya, majority owned by Orange Group of France, but not from a customer experience point of view. Late last year, we moved our home and office from Nairobi to Laikipia County, North-West of Mount Kenya, and set up our information design and market research office in Nanyuki. I wanted dedicated office telephone lines so looked up the Orange / Telkom Kenya website mid-year, several months before the move; on the website, there were clearly defined service and product offerings and a simple web form to lodge my request which I completed and submitted.

The derelict Orange / Telkom Kenya building in Nanyuki, Laikipia County (photo by author)

I received an email response after a week. Unintentionally, the person who responded included a long email thread originating from the initial request. Apparently, my original enquiry, which plainly stated what I wanted – a post-paid wireless telephone line for an office in Nanyuki – had instigated an internal skirmish that revolved around which business region Nanyuki was in and who, therefore, should handle this business opportunity.

The internal email exchanges were hilarious to read but betrayed the lack of clarity, market knowledge and decisiveness at Telkom Kenya. The tussle started, encouragingly, with a volunteer: “Let me follow up from Nakuru.” This was promptly smothered by someone else who considered this an encroachment: “Laikipia falls under my region” followed by the apparent referee in this matter: “unless I am mad or confused, Nanyuki is under who exactly?” followed by a tail-between-the-legs moment from the volunteer: “I guess Laikipia is quite large…” and finally “Laikipia is my area!” from the one who had finally been tasked with following up my enquiry.

This internal tiff having been settled thus, the beneficiary emailed me a quotation on a plain Microsoft Word document which stated how much the sim-cards and telephone sets would cost and how much the post-paid deposit would be. I called to ask if this was an official quote from Telkom Kenya since there was no branding, address or named source on the document. I was told to pop into the Nanyuki office if I wanted an official quote. The telephone sets, however, were not available so no progress could be made.

I re-visited the Orange / Telkom Kenya website again in May 2014 and resubmitted my request. In the meantime, I had migrated my Safaricom post-paid modem data line to voice and inserted the sim-card into an old mobile handset which now served as the office telephone as I awaited Telkom Kenya to come through. The response this time was without incident and I was assured that someone would get back to me soon. The next day, another person called and began the conversation by asking what I wanted to which I responded in complete exasperation: don’t you people speak to each other? Don’t you read the enquiries before making the calls? What exactly do you want to know beyond what I have submitted for you to establish what I need?

Despite the Orange / Telkom Kenya web form being immensely simple to complete and covering the basic information to complete a sale, they have not closed this one, one year after the initial enquiry. My experience tells me I am not alone. At Telkom Kenya, making a wireless sim-card sale and supplying a desktop telephone set is considered a rather complex manoeuvre, demanding exhaustive internal deliberation and repeated customer inquisition. Any wonder customer numbers are dwindling and usage of their telephone services is shrinking? Since they still have people calling and running around but are not completing sales, any wonder they are not profitable?

Despite the pervasive mobile phone, desktop phones still have a place in business and Telkom Kenya has a reliable wireless technology. What is lacking is the kamikaze-like zeal of the street vendors who sell car and home accessories, DVDs and other knick-knacks on many African streets. Perhaps the knowledge that, with no sales, there will be no money for food, rent, school fees and other important needs drives these sellers. At Telkom Kenya, there appears to be no connection between effort and reward, the legacy of being a former state-owned entity. The evidence that this culture pervades in Telkom Kenya years after the buy-out by Orange demonstrates the latter's failure to convert its employee’s attitude from a desk-bound, civil service mentality to a street-smart, commercial-savvy mind-set.