Your Vision Brought to Life
Most construction problems do not announce themselves. They arrive quietly — a crack that appears eighteen months after handover, a roof that leaks in the second rainy season, a floor finish that starts lifting two years in. By the time the problem is vi ...
There is a moment on a construction project that every contractor and architect recognises. Work is underway, the foundation is done, walls are going up — and then someone realises the drawings do not show what happens at a particular junction, or that a ...
Drive through any Kenyan city. Look at the buildings. Not the handful of landmark projects. Not the buildings that get photographed and shared. The ordinary ones — the residential developments, the commercial blocks, the apartment buildings going up o ...
"Just give me a quote." I hear this more than almost anything else. A client calls, they have a piece of land, they have an idea of what they want to build, and they want a number. Not a conversation. Not a site visit. A number they can take away and ...
I want to start with something that happened before Zaha Hadid built anything. In 1983, she entered a competition for a leisure centre on a hillside in Hong Kong called The Peak. Her design proposed what she called a horizontal skyscraper — a structur ...
There is a conversation I have had more than once with clients that goes something like this. The project is underway. Materials are on site or on order. The team is mobilized. Then the funding stalls. It is never presented as a problem at first. It i ...
I did the interiors at Two Rivers Mall. I completed the work. I showed up every time I was supposed to show up. I never got paid. And I had already used my own money. That is the short version. Here is what it changed. How It Happened When an ...
There is a power plant in Copenhagen with a ski slope on the roof. Not a gimmick. Not a rendering that never got built. A functioning waste-to-energy facility that converts 440,000 tons of waste annually into electricity and district heating for 150,0 ...
I was a junior architect on the JKIA terminal expansion. That title sounds more impressive than the reality of what it meant at the time. Junior architects are supposed to be support — you assist, you learn, you handle the smaller pieces while the senior ...
I had a client come to me two years ago with a budget he had built carefully. He had done his research — talked to contractors in Nairobi, gotten quotes, looked at cost-per-square-metre figures online. He was confident in his numbers. He wanted to build ...