The Building That Knows Where It Comes From
Issue 01 · March 2026 · The Mud & Glass Review
On provenance, vernacular intelligence, and Africa's right to author its own built future.
There is a question that almost nobody in architecture asks, and its absence is slowly costing us everything.
Not: Is this building beautiful? Not: Is it efficient? Not even: Is it sustainable? — a word so thoroughly colonised by marketing departments that it has begun to mean its opposite.
The question is simpler and more radical. It is the question that The Mud & Glass Review exists to ask until the industry can no longer pretend it hasn't heard.
Where does this building come from?
Not who designed it. Not who funded it. Where does it come from — in the deep sense. What earth was displaced to make its foundations? What ideas — about beauty, about permanence, about whose way of living is worth encoding in concrete — are embedded in its walls, whether anyone intended them to be or not?
Every building has a provenance. Most buildings are ashamed of it.
The Lie We Tell Ourselves About Green
Walk through any new development in Nairobi marketed as sustainable and you will find the same vocabulary repeated like a prayer: green roofs, solar panels, LEED-inspired design, eco-conscious materials. You will find renderings lush with computer-generated trees. What you will rarely find is an honest account of provenance.
The glass curtain wall — that beloved symbol of contemporary African ambition — requires enormous quantities of energy to produce, performs poorly in equatorial heat, and was designed for a climate that has nothing to do with Nairobi. Hassan Fathy warned decades ago that glass towers in hot regions create unsustainable cooling demands that buildings in temperate climates never have to confront.[1] The architectural language being deployed — glass towers, steel frames, imported stone — carries within it a worldview about what a serious, modern city looks like. A worldview borrowed from elsewhere, never subjected to the question: does this make sense here?
There is a difference between ambition rooted in genuine understanding of place — its climate, its materials, its culture — and ambition that is essentially imitation. One builds something that belongs. The other impresses briefly, before deteriorating in ways the original context never had to account for.
Africa has spent too long building impressively. It is time to build honestly.
What the Earth Already Knows
Here is what strikes me every time I study vernacular architecture on this continent: it is not primitive. It is not a precursor to something more sophisticated. It is the sophisticated thing — centuries of iterative problem-solving by people who understood that a building must be in genuine conversation with its site.
The Nubian vaulted roof is a passive cooling system of extraordinary elegance, requiring no mechanical intervention, no imported technology. Research published in the International Journal of Environment and Climate Change found that Nubian vault buildings reduced thermal loads by over a third compared to conventional cinder block structures — interior temperatures varying by less than 1.5°C across an entire day. Fathy's Architecture for the Poor remains one of the most important arguments ever made for building from the earth beneath your feet rather than importing solutions designed for someone else's weather.
The most celebrated modern proof stands in Harare. The Eastgate Centre, designed by Mick Pearce and completed in 1996, has no conventional air conditioning. It draws instead on the passive ventilation logic of African termite mounds. The result: 35% less total energy than comparable air-conditioned buildings, with construction costs approximately 10% lower by eliminating HVAC systems entirely. It achieved this by looking at what was already there — not at what was being imported.
These solutions are not accidents. They are arguments — built arguments, encoded in earth and timber and stone, about how to inhabit this planet with intelligence and care. And we are allowing them to fall into disrepair, treating them as heritage objects rather than as active knowledge systems with something urgent to teach a continent facing the most severe consequences of climate breakdown in the world.
The earth already knows how to build here. We have simply stopped listening to it.
The Politics of Material
Asking where a building comes from is not merely an aesthetic question. It is a political one. About whose knowledge counts as expertise. About who gets to define what a serious building looks like. About the relationship between materials supply chains and the physical form of the built environment.
The EDGE certification system — developed by the International Finance Corporation and operating across more than 160 countries — requires a minimum 20% projected reduction in energy use, water use, and embodied energy in materials. A meaningful standard. But research examining EDGE-certified residential buildings in South Africa found that the system disproportionately rewards energy-saving technologies — which accounted for 69.2% of all measures adopted — over the passive, material-led, climate-responsive design that vernacular traditions have refined over centuries.
A rammed earth wall maintaining stable temperatures through passive thermal mass does not score as impressively as a mechanical HVAC system. Compressed earth blocks made from soil beneath a site do not carry the cachet of imported engineered timber. The knowledge embedded in vernacular construction — site-specific, refined over generations, often held by communities rather than credentialled professionals — does not easily translate into the documentation that certification systems require. As Fathy himself observed, the problem is not a lack of appropriate solutions; it is that the systems we use to evaluate architecture were not designed with these solutions in mind.
This is not a conspiracy. It is something more mundane and more pervasive: the quiet operation of systems that were not designed with African contexts in mind, and have never been seriously required to account for that absence.
The Mud & Glass Review will account for it.
An Invitation
I founded Kolando Limited in 2024 because I believe sustainable architecture is not a niche — it is the most urgent design challenge of our time, being met on this continent with a combination of genuine innovation and profound intellectual timidity. The innovation is real. So is the timidity. The Mud & Glass Review exists at the intersection of those two realities.
It is not an architecture magazine in the conventional sense. It does not exist to celebrate buildings. It exists to think seriously about them — the ideas embedded in them, the systems that produce them, the materials that constitute them, and the futures they make more or less possible. It will feature architects and ecologists, policy makers and planners, and the grassroots builders whose knowledge of working with the land represents some of the most sophisticated thinking in architecture today — voices almost entirely absent from the publications that claim to cover this field.
Every building is a theory about the world. It encodes assumptions about what lasts, what matters, who belongs. The Mud & Glass Review is an invitation to read those theories carefully — to celebrate the ones that get it right, and to refuse, politely but firmly, to pretend that the ones that get it wrong are anything other than what they are.
There is a building somewhere: in Nairobi, in Lagos, in Kigali, in a village whose name you have not heard — that knows exactly where it comes from. Built from the earth beneath it. Responsive to the climate around it. Carrying the knowledge of the people who made it. It will still be standing, still making sense, long after the glass towers beside it have begun to fail.
That building is the one this publication is interested in.
We are just getting started.
Ruby Odhiambo is the founder of Kolando Limited, a sustainable architecture and design studio based in Nairobi. She is certified in Sustainable Finance for Climate and Energy (UNDP) and in green building through EDGE (IFC). The Mud & Glass Review is published weekly. If you are building something that should last — get in touch.
