Design in Deep Time

To understand the work of Cave_bureau, you need to understand the context of Kenya. Situated in East Africa, it is home to the Great Rift Valley, often called the ‘cradle of humanity’, where some of our earliest human ancestors were discovered. Its diverse landscapes, from savannahs to highlands, boast rich ecosystems and extraordinary biodiversity. Kenya’s geology, weather and location meant that, between April to August, southwest monsoon winds facilitated the travel of ships from East Africa to the Indian subcontinent. This served as a vital trading route, linking the continent to global markets through the Indian Ocean, making it a lucrative funnel for trade in both goods and people. Over centuries, this ecological wealth attracted successive waves of colonisers, notably, the British, between 1895 and 1963.

The Maasai, people who speak the Maa language, are indigenous to the Great Rift Valley and were the first inhabitants of Nairobi: ‘the place of cool waters’ in Maa. The Maasai have long practised sustainable grassland maintenance through a migatory, pastoralist lifestyle herding cattle across Kenya’s grasslands. They rely on cattle for all their needs – currency, food, clothing and shelter – understanding that prioritising the needs of their livestock and the land is essential to their own survival.

By moving livestock cyclically across rangelands, visiting Nairobi as a source of water, the Maasai prevented overgrazing and allowed grasslands to regenerate naturally. This rotational grazing system supported biodiversity and maintained soil health for generations, crucial for the resilience of savannah ecosystems. The Maasai view the land as a living and shared resource to be managed communally for sustainable use by both human and more-than-human inhabitants.

During the period of British colonialism, Maasai agricultural practices were viewed as backward and disruptive to capitalist and extractive pursuits. The colonisers viewed the land as a resource to extract, exploit and commodify rather than recognising the depth of ecological understanding, sustainable agriculture and communal knowledge systems that had allowed the Maasai to flourish for generations. The rapid industrialisation and modernisation of Kenya widened gaps between communities such as the Maasai and the changing nation, causing a rupture between precolonial and postcolonial life in the country.

This legacy continues today. While growing up in Kenya myself, I witnessed the Maasai become a fetishised symbol of Kenyan identity for tourists. Of the 11 indigenous groups in the country, the Maasai have retained more significant aspects of their indigenous practices and, as a result, they are used in images to promote ‘Kenyan tradition’ alongside tourist activities such as the safari. However, value is placed on their image alone. Kenya’s prevailing economic system incentivises the privatisation of Maasai land and demonstrates a continued disregard for Indigenous practices, leading to the degradation of grasslands, desertification, prolonged droughts and biodiveristy loss. In imposing Western concepts of land ownership and resource extraction, we have inadvertently eroded the systems that had preserved Kenya’s biodiversity and maintained ecological balance.

Speaking from their Nairobi studio via video call, Stella Mutegi and Kabage Karanja, the co-founders of architecture and research practice Cave_bureau, discuss how they take a ‘deep time’ perspective on design and society, seeking to move beyond ‘the constraining timelines of human civilisation to a more-than-human expansive one,’ as Mutegi puts it.

Decolonisation and decarbonisation – and their inseparability – are central to this thesis. Cave_bureau argue that, although political independence was achieved in 1963, Kenyans are yet to address the physical and psychological ruptures that exist between the precolonial and postcolonial ways of living with the land. This rupture is made all the more urgent by the climate crisis, which has made it clear that human needs cannot be separated from those of other organisms. Yet, instead of advocating the use of carbon credits or other offsetting mechanisms in their practice, Cave_bureau advocate for reparative agency to be restored to the land as well as to marginalised and Indigenous communities, such as the Maasai.

Their radical approach to more-than-human design is clearly captured in Cow Corridor. This self-initiated project, conceived in 2021, proposes the establishment of a network of grazing zones and watering holes in the centre of Nairobi – provocative early renders show giraffes grazing on the recently completed 27 kilometre Nairobi Expressway, turning vehicular infrastructure into a nature corridor. ‘Like many cities around the world, this is a city in need of grander interventions of restoration to redefine the more-than-human city of the future,’ Karanja says. Mutegi continues: ‘We envision Nairobi as a more-than-human city, in which the non-human is given a voice.’ Not only would the project improve land quality and biodiversity in the capital, it would also restore the pastoral routes of the Maasai, obstructed since the colonial era.

As part of early tests for the project, Cave have taken out a long-term lease on 100 acres of land on Mount Suswa, a dormant shield volcano about 150 kilometres west of Nairobi, and are using this to work on steam harvesters, a Maasai technology for collecting water from geothermal vents to restore surrounding grassland and for cows to drink. Cave_bureau frame their steam harvesters, developed closely with the Maasai as well as other specialists, in contrast to the geothermal extraction being pursued by the Kenyan government, which can be detrimental to both the natural environment and community rights. As well as a water-producing function, the harvesters are also designed to have symbolic and ceremonial registers, a form of ‘community condenser,’ they write on the Cave_bureau website, ‘where both humans and non-humans can commune’ and which bolsters the Maasai’s cosmic and spiritual relationship to the land.

Speculative projects, such as the harvesters and the Cow Corridor, are an important part of Cave_bureau’s practice, supporting their long-term goal to convince the Kenyan government of the restorative benefits of reversing colonial law and implementing policy change that invokes ancient ‘right-to-roam’ customs. ‘Speculative work helps us manifest projects we want to see in the world, rather than relying on clients to come to us,’ says Kabage, ‘they also act as a “proof of concept” and help us to acquire funding to take projects to the next stage.’ And it works: in 2023, Cave_bureau were awarded a practice-based funding grant by Re:arc Institute to develop and realise a portion of the Cow Corridor, which interconnects with Cave_bureau’s wider research.

Although the practice is based in, and committed to, the Kenyan context, Cave are becoming familiar faces on the international architecture exhibition and biennale circuit. Subject of a solo exhibition at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in 2023 and co-curating the British Pavilion at next year’s Venice architecture biennale, the practice was also prominently featured in the 2021 iteration of the biennale with a piece titled Obsidian Rain. This was a transposed section of the Mbai Freedom Fighter cave, used by Mau Mau anti-colonial freedom fighters, made out of fragments of obsidian – a naturally occurring glass formed when volcanic lava cools rapidly – from the Great Rift Valley. Since 2015, Cave_bureau has been consistently visiting, surveying and 3D-scanning caves across Kenya, starting with the Mau Mau caves in the Karura Forest, Nairobi’s ‘green lung’, and expanding to the Mbai Freedom Fighter Caves and the Shimoni Slave Caves near the Tanzanian border.

Obsidian Rain, as well as the Cow Corridor are two parts of a larger, interconnected ten-part research project Cave_bureau calls The Anthropocene Museum. This is conceived as a speculative roaming museum that showcases humanity’s impact on the planet through a consolidation of all the projects they have made for galleries, museums and biennales across the world. Stella argues that the ‘museum on the [African] continent is inextricably linked to histories of colonial erasure and extraction’ and instead advocates that sites in the landscape such as the cave – both as a physical space and as a methaphor – is a provocation to invite new thinking about how architecture can adapt to more ecologically sensitive, low carbon, more-than-human futures.

Each project iterates their notion of ‘reverse futurism’, the understanding that for a future to exist we need to undo the mistakes of the past. In this sense, Cave’s work advocates for conceptual imaginary leaps as much as it does legislative changes or new architectural realities. As Karanja writes in the catalogue for their show at Louisiana, ‘our capacity to imagine has been a major causal factor in making homo sapiens the dominant species on Earth’; it is both our greatest strength and most devastating weakness. Despite the problems humans have caused, we also possess the capacity to envision solutions but, to avoid repeating anthropocentric attitudes, a multispecies perspective is needed. Cave_bureau propose that the more-than-human may well need to be a key collaborator in the imagination of these solutions. They offer up an opportunity for redemption, compelling us to set aside human-centred design and learn by reclaiming communal knowledge through indigenous practices that respect the land and its multispecies as partners in envisioning the future.