Planned for a historic prison site in central Kigali, the 5,000-seat cathedral brings together religious architecture, adaptive reuse and Rwanda’s wider ambitions for cultural tourism.
A former colonial-era prison in the centre of Kigali is set to become the site of one of Rwanda’s most ambitious pieces of contemporary religious architecture. Designed by David Adjaye, the proposed Mater Misericordiae Cathedral will occupy the grounds of the former Kigali Central Prison, commonly known as “1930” after the year of its completion.
The project entered a new phase in June 2026, when Rwanda Development Board chief executive Jean-Guy K. Afrika met Cardinal Antoine Kambanda, Archbishop of Kigali, and Adjaye to launch a campaign for its implementation. The RDB has positioned the cathedral not simply as ecclesiastical infrastructure, but as a project combining architecture, heritage and destination development, with anticipated effects across tourism, hospitality, the creative industries and Kigali’s urban economy.
That positioning is significant because of the site itself.
From incarceration to congregation
Kigali Central Prison was completed during the colonial period in 1930 and became one of the Rwandan capital’s oldest surviving structures. Its final prisoners were transferred to a new correctional facility in Mageragere in July 2018, leaving approximately 5.5 hectares of centrally located land available for redevelopment. Early proposals considered uses ranging from a heritage hotel to high-end residential development before the Catholic Church acquired the site.
The eventual programme introduces an unusually charged architectural reversal: a complex designed around confinement is being reworked as a place of collective worship.
Rather than treating the prison as a tabula rasa, however, the redevelopment has been discussed in terms of preservation and reuse. Kigali’s chief urban planner, Marie-Solange Muhirwa, said in 2022 that the city was working with the Catholic Church to determine what elements should be retained because of the site’s historical importance. The former prison is among a group of sites recognised for their heritage value within Kigali’s urban planning framework.
This makes Mater Misericordiae as much an adaptive-reuse proposition as a monumental religious commission. Its architectural challenge lies in accommodating a major new cathedral while negotiating the physical and symbolic weight of the structure it replaces.
A cathedral conceived at an urban scale
The scale of the proposal moves it beyond that of a conventional parish church. Plans reported for the project indicate an interior capacity of approximately 5,000 people, complemented by exterior gathering areas capable of accommodating as many as 20,000 worshippers during major celebrations.
That combination of enclosed sanctuary and large external congregation space positions the cathedral as both building and civic landscape. In a city where religious gatherings can operate at metropolitan scale, its open spaces will be as important to its function as the principal worship hall.
It also places the project within a longer history of cathedrals acting as urban markers: buildings whose significance extends beyond their congregations to orientation, ceremony and civic identity.
The cathedral is intended to replace the relatively small St Michel cathedral in Kiyovu as the seat of the Archdiocese of Kigali. Plans to relocate the cathedral to the former prison site were already public by 2022, while Rwanda’s electricity development planning subsequently identified a “Kigali Catholic Cathedral” on the former 1930 prison plot among anticipated major developments.
Architecture as destination
Mater Misericordiae also illustrates how Rwanda is increasingly connecting architecture to its tourism and development strategy.
The Rwanda Development Board describes the project as a future landmark of “spiritual, cultural, and architectural significance”, explicitly linking investment in cultural heritage with destination development. Officials expect the cathedral to contribute to tourism and hospitality while generating opportunities for creative industries and further development around the site.
That ambition changes the architectural brief. The cathedral is expected to function simultaneously as a working religious institution, a heritage intervention, a major public gathering place and an international destination.
Adjaye’s involvement further places the commission within a body of work concerned with how monumental architecture can carry historical narratives. Here, however, the most consequential design question may not be monumentality itself, but how a new monument is inserted into a place already carrying a difficult history.
The transformation of the “1930” prison is therefore unlikely to be judged solely by the visual impact of the cathedral. Its architectural significance will depend on how successfully the project negotiates what remains: which elements of the prison are retained, how they are incorporated into the new complex, and whether the history of incarceration remains legible once the site assumes an entirely different civic and spiritual function.
Nearly a century after the prison was built, Mater Misericordiae proposes another kind of institution on the same ground. In doing so, the project offers Kigali something more complex than a new landmark: an opportunity to test how contemporary African architecture can accommodate memory while giving historic urban sites radically new lives.
