Nairobi · 7–11 September 2026
This September, Nairobi will become the meeting point for one of the most ambitious new platforms for African architecture and spatial practice: the inaugural Pan-African Biennale (PAB).
Taking place from 7 to 11 September 2026, the Biennale is positioning itself as the first continental architecture biennale in history, bringing together architectural practices, designers, researchers, thinkers, artists, institutions and communities from across Africa and its diaspora. Its programme will unfold across five days of talks, panels, workshops, screenings, exhibitions and open-studio encounters throughout Nairobi.
The inaugural edition, titled Shifting the Center: From Fragility to Resilience, begins from a deliberately provocative proposition: Africa should not be treated as a subject of architectural discourse, a case study for external institutions, or a recipient of imported models. Instead, the continent should be recognised as a producer of architectural knowledge, spatial intelligence and ideas about the future.
The Biennale’s curatorial framework identifies three broad areas of inquiry—Climate Change, Vernacular Intelligence and African Futures—while challenging the inherited systems through which African architecture has historically been represented and valued.
Nairobi is therefore more than a host city. The Biennale describes the city as an active curatorial site: a place whose architectural history, contemporary practices and complex urban realities will become part of the programme itself.
Here is what to expect across the five days.
Day One — Shifting the Centre
The opening day establishes the intellectual proposition of the Biennale: Africa is not on the periphery of architectural discourse. Africa is one of its foundational sources.
The day begins at the Kenyatta International Convention Centre (KICC) with the official opening ceremony at 10:30. It marks the formal beginning of the inaugural edition and includes remarks from the Biennale’s leadership as well as the launch of its publication.
At 11:00, “Does African Architecture Exist?” will put one of the most persistent assumptions surrounding the continent’s architecture on trial.
Africa contains thousands of languages, climates, cultures and building traditions, yet architectural discourse has frequently reduced this complexity to a single geographic category. The opening conversation asks whether “African architecture” can meaningfully be understood as one thing—or whether the very question reveals the limitations of the frameworks through which the continent has traditionally been viewed.
At noon, “The Biennale Question: Why Africa Needed to Build Its Own” moves from the question of identity to the question of institutional ownership.
For decades, African architecture has appeared within international biennales, exhibitions and institutions often curated from outside the continent. This session asks what changes when Africans create and control the platform themselves—and whether institutional ownership can fundamentally alter the production and circulation of architectural knowledge.
The afternoon begins with “Against,” a fast-paced series of five-minute provocations from practitioners from the continent and its diaspora. Each speaker responds to one question: what are you building against?
The answers are expected to address the forces that shape contemporary African practice, from erasure and extraction to inherited architectural canons and systems that have historically excluded African voices.
At 15:30, invited guests will have access to a private viewing of the exhibition before the public exhibition opening at 16:30.
The first day concludes away from the conference stage with a public film screening at Unseen, beginning at 20:00. Across the Biennale week, the evening screenings will feature films about Africa made by African and diaspora filmmakers, creating another route into the questions explored throughout the programme.
Day Two — Ecologies of Repair
If the first day asks who gets to define African architecture, the second asks what African architecture can teach the world about climate, ecology, materials and repair.
The programme opens at 10:00 with “The Spatial Debt: Climate, Colonialism, and Who Pays.”
Africa contributes a relatively small share of global carbon emissions while facing some of the most severe consequences of climate change. The session examines climate vulnerability not simply as an environmental problem, but as a spatial and political one—asking how colonial histories, extraction and externally imposed development models have shaped who bears the consequences of environmental crisis.
At noon, “After the Debt: Restoration, Regeneration, and the Practice of Repair” shifts the conversation towards action.
Across the continent, restoration is already happening through mangrove rehabilitation, soil regeneration, ecological recovery and the rebuilding of communities. Rather than treating resilience as a distant objective, the discussion positions repair as a practice already embedded within African territories.
The 14:30 programme expands this discussion through two simultaneous sessions.
“What the Ground Already Knows: East African Architecture and the Climate Condition” looks at the accumulated architectural intelligence of East Africa, bringing together histories that include Swahili coastal architecture, colonial planning and post-independence modernism.
Running alongside it, “Nothing Wasted: Circular Construction, Material Intelligence, and the African Building Future” examines circular construction through African material traditions.
The session challenges the idea that circularity is a recently invented Western architectural concept, instead looking towards long-standing African practices of using local materials, minimising waste and designing around available resources.
At 16:00, the programme turns towards territories under direct pressure from water and environmental change.
“Rising Waters: Coastal, Island, and Finite Territories in the African Climate Crisis” explores the particular challenges facing coastal and island communities, while “The Same Wall, Two Readings: Earth Architecture and the Double Standards of Global Architectural Discourse” confronts a persistent contradiction in architectural culture.
When earth, thatch and vernacular materials are used by African communities, they can be interpreted through the language of poverty or underdevelopment. When similar materials are deployed by celebrated Western practices, they are often reframed as sustainable innovation.
The second day also moves beyond the lecture hall.
A workshop developed by Bauhaus Earth, Ardhi Na Mbao and APC will provide a hands-on component, while the Biennale’s Open Office programme will allow visitors to enter working Nairobi practices including SHOUT, Urko Sanchez Architects and Local Works Studio.
The day closes with another public screening at Unseen.
Day Three — Living Archives & Embodied Knowledge
Day Three turns towards memory, documentation, material culture and the forms of knowledge that architecture has historically failed to recognise.
At 10:00, “What Was Taken: Architectural Restitution and the Built Heritage” extends the restitution debate beyond objects and artworks.
Colonial systems did not only remove cultural artefacts from Africa. They also classified, documented and interpreted architectural histories through external institutions. This session asks what architectural restitution could mean—and what it would require to return control over spatial histories and knowledge.
At noon, “The Grammar of Africa: Criticism, Representation, and How Architectural Discourse Constructs a Continent” turns its attention to language.
Critics, writers, editors and publishers will examine who gets to describe African architecture, which vocabularies have become dominant, and what a genuinely African critical discourse might look like when developed from within the continent.
The afternoon begins with two parallel conversations.
“Carried by Women: Traditional Spatial Knowledge and Collective Life” examines the role of women as custodians and producers of spatial knowledge across generations. The discussion expands the understanding of architectural authorship beyond professional practice to include women who have designed, built, cultivated land, managed water and sustained communal environments.
Alongside it, “Transient and Unbounded: Indigenous Knowledge, Nomadic Territories and the Intelligence of Impermanence” explores nomadic spatial systems through Tuareg, Maasai and Somali contexts.
Rather than interpreting mobility as a lack of permanence, the session approaches impermanence as a sophisticated spatial condition shaped by climate, material knowledge, memory and movement.
At 16:00, the programme turns to two further questions.
“Sick by Design: What Vernacular Space Knows About Health That Architecture Forgot” examines the relationship between architecture and public health, asking how spatial design can influence exposure to diseases such as malaria, cholera and respiratory infections.
Meanwhile, “Building the African Archive: Who Collects, Who Controls, Who Decides” considers the politics of architectural documentation itself.
Where are Africa’s architectural records held? Who decides what gets preserved? Who controls access? And what happens when African practitioners and institutions begin to build and control their own archives?
The day’s workshops continue this emphasis on material and institutional knowledge, including sessions developed by Boogertman + Partners and the National Museums of Kenya, a Rammed Earth Workshop with Terracraft, and a workshop hosted by Ajwang + Langat.
Visitors can also explore Nairobi’s architectural practices through Open Office visits to Ardhi Na Mbao and Cave Bureau.
Again, the day concludes with a public film screening at Unseen.
Day Four — Imagining Otherwise
By the fourth day, the Biennale moves decisively towards the future.
“Imagining Otherwise” asks a fundamental question: who has the right to imagine Africa’s future?
At 10:00, “The City That Has Not Been Built Yet: Designing for 2.5 Billion” considers the scale of Africa’s demographic and urban transformation.
With Africa’s population projected to reach approximately 2.5 billion by 2050, the continent faces an extraordinary urban design challenge—and opportunity. The session asks who will design the cities that emerge, and whether African architects and institutions can reclaim that future from externally driven development models.
At noon, “Beyond Shelter: Rethinking Housing as a Shared Act” challenges the idea of housing as an individual commodity.
Rather than treating a home simply as a unit, mortgage or private transaction, the session opens a broader conversation around collective housing, shared responsibility and community ownership.
The 14:30 programme then looks at materials and education.
“From the Ground Up: Local Material Intelligence and the Future of Building” explores possibilities ranging from agricultural waste to mycelium composites, asking what African construction could look like by 2050 when local resources and existing material intelligence become central to innovation.
Alongside it, “The Canon Was Never African: Architectural Education and the Knowledge It Refuses” questions the systems through which architects are trained.
What knowledge is considered legitimate architectural education? What happens to oral traditions, community knowledge and indigenous spatial intelligence when they fall outside the academy?
At 16:30, the Biennale moves into speculative territory with “The Future Was Always African: Afrofuturism, AI, and the Architecture of What Is to Come.”
The session brings together Afrofuturist imagination and artificial intelligence to explore how technology can participate in the creation of African futures—and what happens when AI systems trained predominantly on Western datasets are used to imagine African cities.
Rather than simply discussing the future, the session is conceived as a live act of world-building.
Workshops throughout the day include “Imagining African Cities,” hosted by the Global Change Institute at Wits University, and “African Anthropocene.”
The Open Office programme will also open the doors of o/s Architecture and Boogertman + Partners.
The evening once again moves to Unseen for the day’s public film screening.
Day Five — Pan-Africanism: The Centre in Motion
The final day returns to the political and historical idea at the heart of the Biennale itself: Pan-Africanism.
The closing programme argues that Pan-Africanism has always had a spatial dimension. It emerged through networks of people, institutions, churches, universities, cities and communities connecting Africa and its diaspora.
At 10:00, “Pan-Africanism Was Always Spatial: Dispersal Was Never Defeat” traces that history through the Black Atlantic, exploring how displaced African communities transformed spaces of exile into sites of political organisation, cultural continuity and collective imagination.
At noon, “Essential and Invisible: Migration, Belonging, and Pan-African Urban Space” examines movement within and beyond the continent.
From the Sahara to the Swahili coast and across the Mediterranean, migration has always shaped African cities. The session asks how migrant and mobile communities create, occupy and contest urban spaces that often fail to recognise them.
At 14:30, the format changes again.
“Never Left: The Pan-African World Beyond the Continent” is structured as a testimonial assembly rather than a conventional panel. Four practitioners from the wider Pan-African world will speak about what they carry from Africa, what they build and what they send back.
The programme then reaches its culmination at 16:45 with “The Centre Has Moved: A Declaration.”
Conceived as the closing assembly of the inaugural Biennale, the session invites participants, speakers and delegates to contribute a position, demand or spatial claim. These contributions will be assembled live into a collective declaration and read aloud.
The document is intended to become a permanent closing statement for the first edition.
The final day also includes a Nairobi Sketch Tour, taking participants through the city’s architectural layers on foot, as well as Open Office visits to Studio OMT and Studio 1-1.
More Than an Architecture Exhibition
What makes the Pan-African Biennale particularly significant is the way its programme extends beyond the conventional architecture biennale format.
There is an exhibition, but the exhibition is surrounded by debates about climate and colonialism, workshops on materials and construction, conversations about archives and restitution, film screenings, architectural tours and opportunities to enter working studios across Nairobi.
The programme also reflects the Biennale’s continental ambition.
The official participant list includes practices and practitioners from all 54 African countries, alongside participating Nairobi offices including O/S Architecture, Ajwang + Langat Design Bureau, Ardhi Na Mbao, Local Works, Studio Propolis, Urko Sanchez, Cave Bureau, Studio 1:1 and Boogertman + Partners.
That breadth matters because the institution is deliberately designed not to remain permanently in Nairobi. The inaugural edition is the first stop for a Biennale intended to rotate between African cities, shifting the institutional centre with every edition.
Nairobi, in this sense, is both beginning and proposition.
It offers the Biennale a city shaped by colonial planning, post-independence development, informal urbanism, global institutions, local architectural practices and rapid contemporary transformation. The city becomes a living context through which the Biennale’s larger questions can be tested.
A New Platform for African Architectural Thought
The Pan-African Biennale arrives at a moment when questions around African authorship, climate resilience, indigenous knowledge, urbanisation and the future of African cities are increasingly central to global architectural conversations.
But the Biennale’s proposition goes further than asking for greater representation.
Its argument is that African architecture does not simply need more space within existing global systems. It needs institutions capable of producing architectural discourse from African realities and perspectives.
That is why the five-day programme moves between history and speculation, ecology and technology, archives and futures, vernacular knowledge and artificial intelligence.
The central question is not simply what does African architecture look like?
It is who gets to define it, who gets to preserve its knowledge, who gets to build its cities, and who gets to imagine what comes next?
In Nairobi this September, the Pan-African Biennale intends to make its answer clear: the centre is shifting—and it is shifting from within Africa.
The Pan-African Biennale takes place in Nairobi from 7–11 September 2026. The exhibition and public talks are open to the public, while additional passes provide access to the wider city-wide programme, workshops, networking and other experiences.
For the latest programme information, venues and ticketing details, visit the official Pan-African Biennale programme page.
