East Africa: The Latest Architecture and News

Every large dam divides as much as it connects, and the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam is no exception. A monumental feat of architecture and engineering, the mega-dam has brought everyone together, for better or worse, to interrogate who gets to declare sovereignty over the riches of the river, be it water or momentum, and to challenge colonial-era Nile treaties.

Inaugurated in September 2025, the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, or GERD, is a grand concrete structure on the Blue Nile, Abay, in western Ethiopia within the Benishangul-Gumuz region, just 30 kilometers upstream along the river and east of the border with Sudan. It is built as a major source of hydroelectric power, generating an estimated 51.5% of total national output in 2025/26, and symbolizes Ethiopia's national sovereignty, rise to exponential economic development, and technological self-determination. So, why has it become the center of a protracted dispute over regional water security and international law between Ethiopia, Sudan, and Egypt?

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Videos

"Take your dream suppressants." The opening line in Wanuri Kahiū's Pumzi, directed at our protagonist Asha, enforces the order of severing ties with hopeful futures and ancestral memories in pasts shared to compel her focus on the perpetual present in the Maitu Community's heterotopia of an enclave. The bird's-eye view shot of the Maitu reveals a sterile, drone-like structure with a panoptic sphere at its center where normal human behavior is medicalized. The layout is built around closed-loop recycling systems as apt as a self-sufficient organism, designed to escape the toxic environment of a sickly Earth, where every pipe and corridor is engineered to harvest human excretion for water generation, thereby absorbing the roles of nature and state both. The community's architecture perfectly translates the film's message with its physicality.

Across folklore, film, and art, the same move recurs: architecture translates an elsewhere, whether ancestral, spiritual, or speculative, into form that can be seen or entered. The sections below follow that translation from the Kasubi Tombs to Kizazi Moto, and show that the elsewhere is a way of reading the present.

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Colonial violence in African cities bled through the political dimensions into the spatial realm. It is infused into street grids, land tenure systems, drainage infrastructure and residential zones that continue to organize inequality and displacement today. Kinshasa, Khartoum, and Kampala each carry this afterlife in their urban morphology, at once historical artifacts and an active structure; shaping who has access to services, who occupies flood-prone land, and catalyzing a deepening climate instability that forces this apparatus into entirely new dimensions - including geological ones.

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Kéré Architecture has designed a new healthcare center in the Bubanza region of Burundi, about 40 kilometers north of the country's former capital, Bujumbura. Commissioned by the NGO Ineza Clinic, the project aims to improve access to healthcare for the region's rural population, complementing the services of the existing general hospital, with a focus on maternity and specialized surgical care. Francis Kéré's plan distributes the program across ten pavilions connected by a road that zigzags up the hillside toward a visitor center, forming a 3,000 m² complex. The project combines materials sourced from the surrounding region, traditional craftsmanship, and knowledge transfer, minimizing its carbon footprint, supporting the local economy, and strengthening local teams. Construction has already started, with the first phase scheduled for completion this year.

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Architectural competitions have long offered a space for experimentation: platforms where ideas can be tested, typologies reimagined, and critical questions addressed through design. Freed from some of the constraints of commercial commissions, competition entries often reflect ambitious visions for how architecture can respond to environmental, cultural, and social challenges. Whether focused on future habitats, public institutions, or small-scale community infrastructure, these proposals give shape to the values and priorities driving architectural thinking today.

This month's Unbuilt selection brings together eight competition-winning projects submitted by the ArchDaily community. Each received first, second, or third place in recent local and international competitions. The featured proposals span a wide range of programs and geographies: a sustainable library in Lima, a Martian habitat exploring closed-loop systems, an adult orphanage designed for empowerment in India, a new French school in Athens, and a placemaking initiative in Singapore rooted in local folklore. While varied in scale and scope, they all highlight architecture's capacity to engage context, foster inclusion, and propose new ways of inhabiting space.

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The legacy of the Modernist movement is a complicated one. Spanning a diverse assortment of fiercely debated sub-categories and styles, the Modernist style has established its presence in virtually every continent. Although the movement's origins may be rooted in Europe and the U.S., outside of the Eurocentric canon architects have redefined and re-established the definition of a "Modernist" building. In Sri Lanka, for example, architect Geoffrey Bawa's sensitive, nature-inspired architectural responses gave rise to the "Tropical Modernism" label. Over in the African continent, it is in the East-African country of Tanzania that some highly unique examples of Modernist architecture are found – headed by architects Anthony Almeida and Beda Amuli.

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The luxury hotel, as an architectural typology, is distinctive. In effect, it's a self-contained community, a building that immerses the well-off visitor into their local context. Self-contained communities they might be, but these hotels are also vessels of the wider socioeconomic character of a place, where luxury living is often next door to informal settlements in the most extreme examples of social inequality.

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This article was originally published on Common Edge.

Compared to that of the West and East, awareness and knowledge of the architecture of sub-Saharan Africa—Africa south of the Sahara Desert—is scant. A new book intends to mitigate this oversight, and it’s a significant accomplishment. Architectural Guide Sub-Saharan Africa (DOM publishers, 2021), edited by Philipp Meuser, Adil Dalbai, and Livingstone Mukasa, was more than six years in the making. The seven-volume guide presents architecture in the continent’s 49 sub-Saharan nation-states, includes contributions by nearly 340 authors, 5,000 photos, more than 850 buildings, and 49 articles expressly devoted to theorizing African architecture in its social, economic, historical, and cultural context. I interviewed two of the editors—Adil Dalbai, an architectural researcher and practitioner specializing in sub-Saharan Africa, and Livingstone Mukasa, a native Ugandan architect interested in the intersections of architectural history and cultural anthropology—about the challenges of creating the guide, some of its revelations about the architecture of Africa, and its potential impact.

For centuries and centuries we’ve built – and the diversity in our global built environment is a testament to that. The many different cultures around the globe have had different ways of building throughout history, adapting locally found materials to construct their structures. Today, in our globalized present, building materials are transported across the globe far from their origins, a situation that means two buildings on completely opposites sides of the world can be more or less identical. 

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The year 2021 has been a turbulent one –coronavirus rages on, and the design and construction industries have been forced to keep adapting two years into a global pandemic. As virtual methods of working and communicating continue to be tweaked and honed, a plethora of virtual events has meant that architectural discourse outside the western canon and Eurocentric gaze, in a small way, has been able to claim space front and center in the global architectural conversation.

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A few months ago – in July 2021, the 47-year-old Kariakoo Market went up in flames in Dar es Salaam. Designed by Tanzanian architect Beda Amuli, the market is a central landmark – a key part of Dar es Salaam’s commercial hub. Early images of a new Kariakoo Market show a taller structure, with six floors compared to the three in Amuli’s design. Conversations on social media have abounded on the new design, and if a “tower” typology is really the appropriate choice considering the unpopular nature of other similar “tower” market halls in Dar es Salaam.

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When we think of migration, we think of movement. We think of the movement of people simply looking for greener pastures – a better life for themselves. But we also think of war, of conflict, of an unstable situation in a specific place forcing the hand of a location’s residents to seek safety elsewhere. Historically and into present day, war has been the reason for the increased presence of refugees. Instability in places such as Syria, Iraq, or the Central African Republic have caused millions to flee their homes. Lurking amongst this migration due to conflict, however, is the migration of people at mercy of the changing environmental conditions of the Earth – climate migration.

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Videos

A new video by AERIAL FUTURES explores the potential of droneports in East Africa and the Global South. The Norman Foster Foundation was one of the first groups to propose the creation of a droneport network to deliver medical supplies and other necessities to areas of Africa that are difficult to access due to a lack of roads or other infrastructure. The project aspires to have droneports across small towns in Africa and in other emerging economies by 2030.

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