For a long time, modern African ambition has looked like concrete, glass and air conditioning. Shiny, imported and expensive to cool.

It appears in cities across the continent: buildings that could be anywhere, which is another way of saying they do not fully belong anywhere. They perform progress, but often ignore the most obvious things around them: heat, dust, shade, wind, soil, memory, how people gather, how people move, how the day actually feels.

So it is interesting, and maybe overdue, that Nairobi is about to host a very different kind of architectural conversation.

In September 2026, the city will host the Pan-African Biennale of Architecture at KICC, bringing together built-environment professionals from all 54 African nations under the theme Shifting the Center: From Fragility to Resilience. At the same time, the University of Nairobi will host the African Architectural and Urban History Network’s major academic conference, with conversations around regional identity and the dismantling of Eurocentric architectural curriculums.

Two events. One city. One question sitting in the middle of the room:

Who gets to define what African architecture is?

Across the continent, some of the most interesting buildings are not trying to impress us by looking imported. They are looking down, around and back. At the soil, the sun, old techniques, local materials and the intelligence that was already here before modernity arrived wearing a hard hat.

In Dakar, Kéré Architecture’s new Goethe Institut is made using compressed earth blocks harvested from Senegalese soil. The thick earthen walls help keep the building cool. A double-skin roof draws the sometimes oppressive Sahel heat upward and out through passive ventilation. 

In Agadez, Niger, architect Mariam Issoufou Kamara of Atelier Masōmī transformed a derelict mosque into the Hikma complex: a community library, with a new mosque built alongside it. The project uses locally fabricated adobe bricks and traditional Hausa earth masonry techniques. In desert heat, it requires no mechanical cooling.

Yet, despite the obviosity, both feel radical. 

And that may be the most exciting thing about this new architectural moment: the recognition that the future does not have to be made from materials that ignore place. That earth is not backward. Shade is not primitive. Ventilation is not an aesthetic choice. What the land provides can be technical, beautiful and deeply intelligent.