Field Notes from Rural Kenya in the Rainy Season- May 2025

• There is always a single dragonfly hovering in the center atrium. Maybe it gets its own floor pattern? It's red.

• Metamorphic stones onsite are 2.5 Billion years old. Making it the oldest accessible building stone in Africa. 1.5 billion years older than any NYC/NJ bedrock.

• The way the sky is framed right now from the center atrium before the roof- we'll never see again.

• Bags of cement, carried on heads.

• Stair needs to be modified. Will build higher, angle it up and do it what we can to make it feel like an unfurling plant... Verified with crew that the stair will be an unfolding flower.

• I've expressed to the guys onsite that my view is that this building is addressing the issues that come from a rainforest becoming agrarian land... The building itself is tall and feels like you are under a large canopy.

• Watched the water come from the exact locations of the future downspouts in vertical columns long after the rain had subsided... the 'fountains' will flow naturally after the rainstorms for 1/2 hour or so while the water is released.

• The prevailing winds come from the east so they naturally enter the facade with the most fenestration.

• One bee sting per day. Radiates up the limbs into the torso... My white skin is like the moon. They come after me at night. Queen was recently displaced. Looking for a new home.

• The effect of all the materials together is that they mimic the colors of wet local soil as it looked when cut by the excavator, from bluish grays, browns, and rich red clay.

• Leaning towards red on all metal paint (steel trusses, exterior windows and doors, misc interior metals), red like FLW. Primed steel red. Iron oxide red. Rust red. Clay tile red. Really ties the room together.

• The Maridadi (Kiswahili for fashionable, nice looking) Many things I like are not Maridadi. Terrazzo is not maridi according to a worker. It is considered old school. I say, “I like old school and in America, this amount of terrazzo is like a jillion dollars. This is luxury."

• The formwork wood is Eucalyptus and soft like string cheese to the point where it's unusable for any interior application as a reuse project. It will likely be repurposed on another site or used as firewood.

• Stair will be punctured by multiple 200mm glass blocks for light placed at random. Inside the core, looking up, 5 meters above, a little constellation. 

• Each fountain will behave differently. One is quiet, a trickle. One is a bubbler. One has movement like a class 1 rapid. The last is an umbrella, reflecting the form of the building. Each is an indigenous creature- a tilapia, a red tail monkey, a hornbill, a dragonfly. 

• Laid out planter with masonry blocks based on intuition. Came back on Friday and it was built. I second-guessed it overnight- I was going to rearrange... now it's a concrete wall. Lesson- be careful what you draw in concrete.

• We leave room for window washer and maintenance so I offset the planter by 500mm from the interior face of the facade block wall for clearance... provide deep soil for window washer so they won't crush the plants.

• I go to the owner of the door fabricator and ask, 'where does the mahogany come from.' He says, 'Uganda, but they get it from the Congo'... According to my quick research, 90 percent of logging in the Congo is illegal. We won’t be using mahagony. Ever again. 

• I asked what the word for 'moon' was in Swahili. A long pause amongst everyone. Then- 'It's too hard to explain.” Love that.

• A worker told me, I saw this building on TV. It's in America. Pointing-This building. I wish I knew what he was talking about.

• Roads are impassible after a rain. Like, really.

• We are planting seeds. The builders are the hovering dragonfly, a harbinger of good things to come. :)

Kijana Benefit

On September 17th, 2022 Dameron Architecture and Harpreet Dhaliwal co-hosted a benefit with the Kijana Educational Empowerment Initiative to support the development of a new library/media center and amphitheater at the Kijana Global Innovation School in Western Kenya. We are so grateful for everyone's support of this project. Thank you for donating and thank you for making it out to Carroll Hall for the event! We had a great time.

Learn more about the project here.

These awesome photos were taken by MacKenna Lewis.

How to build a time machine.

Step into a time machine, experience the past and future at once. Buildings are time machines. They take you places- reunite you with forgotten memories, allow for your mind to explore the future. Through design, we can manipulate matter to heighten those qualities, to create deeper ties with the past and structure visions for a positive future. History is all around us in the form of matter. The rock you are touching is 1.6 billion years old. Gasses from nebulas make up our sun, our bodies. We stare into the sky and see billions of years into the past, our homes can live thousands of years before becoming soil and trash. Our bodies live decades and thoughts stay in our minds, 7 seconds at a time. Our cities hold centuries of reconstruction and overturning. We see 1888, remember last year, predict 2074. We create matter and time through perception- the five senses. Experience multiple times at once, remember past events, forgotten sensory experiences. Is the physical world illusory? Or does it enter us through our senses and our breath, fundamentally restructuring our bodies? Architecture is a means to try to understand and construct time. By using the time-based qualities of building as design points, we can expand our appreciation of our place in the environment, we make a richer existence, a deeper understanding.

How to build homes for mythical creatures.

The myth of our separation from animals is compounded by stables and leashes, cages and zoos. Our view of animal life is centered on human needs. How could it not be? Our job is to rethink a positive interaction with animal life. We control animals by making them mythical creatures, objectified- the horse and cow, the griffin and centaur, the baby gorilla. The dodo is still with us, we shoot him everyday. As the species that has the power to drive mass extinction, we must realize our responsibility to live with and foster life. We must embrace our stewardship of animals and understand how they are used, vilified, celebrated and mythologized. We can make space for animals in the city, edges of our urban environments and infrastructure. Architecture has the means to empower, through relatively simple measures to reconnect with animal species.

What’s more exciting than Discovering a Secret Garden?

Secret gardens are found through unexpected thresholds, urban walls, closed doors. These places are only seen by the sky, visited by night creatures, held in our minds. The garden is an idealized nature, a respite from our modern life. We recreate the living landscape in places where it has been, very recently, forgotten. We view our gardens as an idea of perfection, abundance and life. What is your idea of perfect nature, your secret garden? Has it been there all along? It’s an answer to a question you didn’t know you had. As the plants come back to or cities, our ecologies leave conceptual wildernesses to be reborn in our backyards. We experience transformation through life, the alchemy of photosynthesis, the rose scent, the wormy earth. Exposure to a living environment is an essential emotional and bodily need.

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“A beautiful garden represents the permanent presence of nature, but reduced to human proportions and put to human use. It is the most effective refuge from the aggressiveness of the modern world.” —Luis Barragán