Underground - The architecture studio Cave_bureau works with colonial history at Louisiana Museum

Scanning a cave

Have you been to a Kenyan cave? When you enter the exhibition of the architectural firm Cave_bureau at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, you will encounter large 3D sculptures of caves and caverns. These caves are the ones where the first humans settled in Kenya and lived their lives. They can thus be considered as the very first architecture of humans. 

The caves have been used for centuries and can be seen as a kind of distillation of Kenya's history: first by the cave dwellers, then by the Maasai when they needed to water their cows, then to keep enslaved captives, and last but not least, as a hideout for freedom fighters against English colonisation. 

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A past as a colonised people 

The Kenyan people have a dark history as colonised by the British Empire. The architecture studio Cave_bureau uses architecture to challenge and address traumas from colonisation but also to comment on our own era and humans' interference with nature. 

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A cow corridor through Kenya

We should not forget that where we as humans are, there has been something else. Or there could have been something else. Because we are pushing the wild nature more and more into the background. 

Cave_bureau exemplifies this with their cow corridor, which winds through Nairobi and shows where the Maasai wandered with their cows before urbanisation took over. 

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The last exhibition in the series The Architect's Studio

Cave_bureau's exhibition at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art is the last in the series The Architect's Studio. The exhibition series, which began in 2017, aimed to provide insight into the architects' process and show how an idea becomes a fixed form. Six architectural studios have participated in the exhibitions.