This fifth volume in Lars Müller’s Architect’s Studio series is dedicated to the Nairobi-based architects Cave_bureau. This acclaimed collective of architects and researchers—the first Kenyan firm to appear at the Venice Architecture Biennale, in 2021—explores the synergy between architecture, urbanism and nature, and curates performative events of resistance within caves along the Great Rift Valley in East Africa. The cave, as physical space and as metaphor, is seen by the collective as a provocation to test the limits of contemporary architecture.

Here, Cave_bureau’s Stella Mutegi and Kabage Karanja describe eight of their projects. Stunning photography is accompanied by essays posing questions about the future of architecture in the age of the Anthropocene, the effects of colonial extraction and erasure on African architecture, as well as the specificity of each continent and each geographic space.