PROFESSOR RUKWARO ROBERT W

The Kenyan Maasai traditional built form in Kajiado District is changing. It is being replaced by the newly developed homesteads and houses which are inadequately planned, designed and lacking in symbolism. The latter are inconsistent with social arrangements and cultural needs of the contemporary Maasai lifestyle. It was the hypothesis of this study that the culture of the Maasai influences the architecture of their built forms. Multiple research tools were used in the collection of data. These included Observation, Focus Group Discussion, Questionnaires and Interviews. Among the techniques used in analysing the data are the chi-square statistics and qualitative analytical procedures based on the material collected through cluster sampling of 92 homesteads which were presented graphically. It is clear that the architectural conditions of Maasai buildings are a result of culture change variables identified as occupation, religion, rituals, education, family set-up and land tenure which have consistently evolved cultural values such as social status, independence, privacy and sedentary lifestyle. The study concludes that, in view of the changed culture of the maasai, the new built form is satifactory in the incorporating the emerging architectural design concepts such as nuclear family house, linearity, divisibility and permanence in response to emerging spaces and artifacts. These concepts symbolise the changing Maasai culture in the built form.

Form making is one of the most important activities that the architect is engaged in when creating architecture. During the process of form making the architect expresses the individual perceptions of reality in tangible form, which is the symbolic form of architecture. When one observes the majority of built forms in the city of Nairobi they are more of an expression of Western culture than Kenyan culture. The individual perceptions of reality of Kenyan culture and nature are not well symbolized in most of the built forms. This has led to lack of a unifying architectonic style that defines and guides the Kenyan mordern architecture. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to establish the extent to which the built forms in Nairobi portray the Kenyan cultural and natural forms through symbolism in their form making. A sample of 21 buildings constructed between 1960 and 2011 in the City of Nairobi were studied. Data was collected using interviews and observation techniques. Qualitative methods were used to analyse the data. Out of the 21 sampled buildings, only 40% seemed to be inspired by Kenyan culture and nature in their built forms. The study recommends that the architects in Kenya create architectural forms that are inspired by natural environment, traditions and cultural values of the local communities. It is only out of this that the symbolic architectural forms in Kenya can be realised

Within the field of architecture, architects and scholars appear to have difficulty making sense of one another’s experience and the relationship between practice and research is often uneven and unclear. In addition, those who identify themselves as scholars of architecture tend to be closed in their academic spheres and vice versa for those who are practitioners. The professionals and scholars seem not to have adequate interchange and reconciliation of the profession. This has not helped much in developing a unifying framework for research and practice of architecture. The scholars and the practicing architect have yet to produce a comprehensive institutional framework capable of directing the profession toward the demonstrable improvement of the architectural practice; training and research. Survey is used as the research design. Questionnaires and interviews were used to collect data from archiects in practice and those in academia, students of architecture and educational administrators. The practicing architects were randomly sampled from the Board of Architects and Quantity Surveying (BORAQS) register. Forty practicing architects were selected. Twenty lecturers and fifty students were interviewed while four administrators were administered questionnaires. Qualitative techniques were used to analyze the responses from the field. This paper has unraveled the minimal relationship between scholars and professionals; the information flow between them and presented the way forward

Historically, it has been observed that people's settlements tend to change with their changing cultural values. Societies in early and rapid transition offer rich laboratories for the testing of this observation. The Maasai of Kenya are such a group that in a relatively short period have undergone revolutionary transformation as a casual observation may reveal. This paper investigates whether there is any relationship between their new built forms and their current cultural values. Using a number of identified culture – change variables including land tenure, education, religion, occupation, and rite of passage, the paper analyses what impact changes in these variables has on the Maasai settlements. It clearly reveals that as these variables change due to contacts with western-based modernity, the settlements have undergone noticeable transformation. For example, change of land tenure from communal to individual leads to permanent settlements. While exposure through education, religion and occupation leads to a change in the spatial organisation of the dwelling and the use of new building materials. These insights are a useful background to any policy matters regarding housing that respects the cultures of the people. They are indications of what can be considered as a transitional architecture as communities struggle to modernise.