21/06/2025
Every day I witness something extraordinary: the spirit of architecture without architects.
Small kiosks packed with thousands of products. Mama mboga shaping whole micro-economies within spaces barely two square meters. Families negotiating inherited land through fences, rooms, and thresholds. Each boundary carries deep cultural meaning.
But on the outskirts, a new landscape appears. It is painted in corporate colours and branded by paint companies and mabati manufacturers. Entire settlements now wear the same plastic gloss, sponsored by marketing rather than meaning.
If AI is trained on this kind of data, based on homogenized and branded landscapes, what will it replicate? Will it preserve cultural heritage, or accelerate its erasure? Will future museums be clad in sponsored sheet metal, curated by paint companies, while real architectural memory, vernacular craft, and the spatial wisdom of survival are lost under algorithmic templates?
In Kenya, most architecture is produced outside the formal profession. It is created by fundis, self-builders, and informal communities. If AI is trained only on formal, regulation-based design logic, does it risk erasing this kind of spatial intelligence?
Should we use AI to impose order, or to learn from the improvisation we have too often refused to recognize as architecture?
In a world where I cannot even share photographs without risking defamation, I trust you understand the point.
This is a reflection from Nakuru, rooted in the everyday ingenuity of Kenyan cities the urban boraqs who shape space with meaning, not metrics. A call to recognize the wisdom of informal urbanism, the power of self-built cities, and the urgent need to document Architecture without Architects.
