New Models is a lecture series that invites practitioners from different disciplines to discuss how their work can change the models around which society is organised. These conversations will address how we can shift power structures, socio-economic forces and structural inequalities present in society today to give us new tools to rethink the world around us.
The research and exhibition programmes of the architecture practice Cave_bureau fall under what they call The Anthropocene Museum, where they curate discursive architectural events of resistance across multiple natural environments commonly within caves such as along the Great Rift Valley, in Kenya, and more recently in Venice Italy at the 17th International Architectural Exhibition. In these environments, they curate stages of congress with multiple communities, to confront the pressing challenges of this age and imagine the construction of new post-colonial futures of our built environments, such as their most recent Anthropocene Museum 4.0 proposal of the “Cow Corridor” infrastructure, which was published in November 2021 on Dezeen.
Cave_bureau is a Nairobi-based bureau of architects and researchers charting explorations into architecture and urbanism within nature. Their work addresses and works to decode both anthropological and geological contexts of the postcolonial African city, explored through drawing, storytelling, construction, and the curation of performative events of resistance. The bureau is driven to develop systems and structures that improve the human condition, without negatively impacting the natural environment and social fabric of communities. By conducting playful and intensive research studies into caves within and around Nairobi, they aim to navigate a return to the limitless curiosity of our early ancestors while confronting the challenges of contemporary rural and urban living.
Recent exhibitions of Cave_bureau’s work include: 17th International Architecture Exhibition, Venice 2021, Awarded a Special Mention for the installation titled “Obsidian Rain”; The World Around Summit, Guggenheim Museum, 2021; Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial, 2019-20; London Festival of Architecture, 2018.
Kabage Karanja is an architect and spelunker. He founded Cave_bureau in 2014 alongside Stella Mutegi. A natural environment enthusiast, he leads the bureau’s geological and anthropological investigations into architecture and nature, which includes orchestrating expeditions and surveys into caves within the Great Rift Valley. He is a serial sketcher and storyteller, driven to script and communicate cave thinking in relation to both built and natural environments. Karanja lives and works in Nairobi.
Stella Mutegi is an architect and spelunker. She founded Cave_bureau in 2014 alongside Kabage Karanja. She is known in the bureau as the problem slayer of all design issues, heading up the technical department and orchestrating the seamless coordination of ideas into built form. She partakes in all Cave_bureau expeditions and surveys into caves within the Great Rift Valley, later steering those geological and anthropological investigations towards a unique architectural product. Mutegi lives and works in Nairobi.
