Forum Lecture: Architecture as an Earth Practice

Monday, February 2, 2026 from 6:00 pm to 7:30 pm

• In-person event
• Ottawa Art Gallery , Ottawa , ON , K1N 0C5

Ottawa Art Gallery – 10 Daly Ave., Ottawa

2025-2026 Forum Lecture Series

Speakers: Kabage Karanja and Stella Mutegi, Cave Bureau, Nairobi, Kenya, and London, England

Free and open to the public

Presented by the Azrieli School of Architecture & Urbanism



Kabage Karanja and Stella Mutegi, of Cave Bureau, will discuss architecture in geophysical terms as both theory and praxis — a material and immaterial interlocutor between social and environmental justice infrastructures of relation.

“Highlighted here will be sites and works that reimagine global cultural institutions as spaces of resistance, protest, and architectural transformation,” they say.

Karanja and Mutegi are architects, curators, and academics. In 2014, they co-founded Cave Bureau, where they lead the studio as directors. They are currently Louis I. Kahn visiting assistant professors at the Yale School of Architecture.

Cave Bureau is a Nairobi-based bureau of architects and researchers charting explorations into architecture as a deep-time earth practice of social and ecological repair. Their work addresses the anthropological and geological context of the postcolonial African city to confront the challenges of contemporary rural and urban lives.

Karanja and Mutegi were co-curators of the British Pavilion exhibition, Geology of Britannic Repair, at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale.

Kabage Karanja is a natural environment enthusiast leading geological and anthropological investigations into architecture and nature, synonymous with Cave Bureau’s work. He heads the research and aesthetic direction, orchestrating expeditions and surveys into caves within the Great Rift Valley, navigating a return to the limitless curiosity of early ancestors.

These playful and intensive research studies form part of a broader decoding of the pre-and post-colonial African city, where Karanja oversees the bureau’s work that manifests through drawing, storytelling, construction, and the curation of performative events of resistance within caves.

Stella Mutegi heads the technical department at Cave, where she orchestrates the coordination of ideas into built form. Her pragmatic and yet lateral attention to detail complements her breadth of experience in the creative and delivery phases of projects. She helps steer the geological and anthropological investigations towards architectural products and partakes in Cave Bureau’s expeditions and surveys into caves within the Great Rift Valley. She also interrogates research studies decoding of the pre-and post-colonial African city.

Images: Work by Cave Bureau at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale