About

The Mud & Glass Review is an ideas platform bridging architecture, sustainability, policy, and cultural discourse - published weekly by Kolando Limited, Nairobi.

We believe the built environment is never neutral. Every structure encodes assumptions about what lasts, what matters, and whose way of living is worth designing for. This publication exists to examine those assumptions critically, honestly, and without deference to the imported frameworks that have shaped — and too often limited — how Africa builds.

What We Cover

We write at the intersection of four territories no other African publication holds simultaneously:

Architecture & Design — the craft, the materials, the spaces. How buildings are conceived, built, and inhabited.

Sustainability & Ecology — the living systems our buildings exist within. Climate, biodiversity, and regenerative practice.

Policy & Systems — the rules, incentives, and institutions that determine what gets built, for whom, and at what cost.

Culture & Discourse — the stories, identities, and ideas embedded in every structure. Africa's right to author its own built future.

Our writing is rigorous without being cold. Lyrical without being vague. And always, quietly, pointing toward what a more regenerative built world could look like.

About the Founder

Ruby Odhiambo is a sustainability strategist, spatial thinker, and writer based in Nairobi. She is the founder of Kolando Limited — a design and ideas studio working at the intersection of architecture, sustainability, ESG strategy, and cultural discourse.

She holds a BSc. Degree in International Business Administration (IBA) from USIU-Africa, certifications in Sustainable Finance for Climate and Energy from UNDP and in Excellence in Design for Greater Efficiencies — the EDGE (IFC) green building standard — making her one of the few voices in African sustainable design who speaks fluently across both the built environment and the financial and policy systems that shape it.

She founded Kolando in 2024 with a single conviction: that the most enduring spaces are always the most honest ones — honest about their materials, their climate, their culture, and the communities they are built to serve.

The Mud & Glass Review is Kolando's editorial voice. The publication Ruby always wanted to read but couldn't find... so she built it instead.

Who We Feature

The Mud & Glass Review publishes and platforms four voices:

Architects & urban designers working on sustainable, culturally resonant projects across Africa
Climate scientists & ecologists whose research shapes how we understand the living systems our buildings inhabit
Policy makers & urban planners navigating the regulations, incentives, and institutions behind the built environment
Community voices & grassroots builders — the vernacular keepers whose knowledge of building with the land often contains the most radical thinking in the room

Work With Kolando

The Mud & Glass Review is a publication. Kolando Limited is the studio behind it.

If you are a developer, NGO, architect, or organisation working on projects that take sustainability seriously, Kolando offers sustainable design consultation, material specification and sourcing, green building certification guidance, and research and content services.

If you are building something that should last — get in touch.