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.