Writing
Statements, curatorial texts & research fragments
Brikicho: Distress vs Design & The Wisdom of the Seeds
Brikicho began as a question I could not stop asking: when we say "African architecture," are we looking at designs of dignity, or architectures of distress created under conditions of emergency?
Incomplete tenements, run-down classrooms, informal rooms, and distressed homesteads are what we often wrongly presented as part of Africa's Architectural identity. But they are the traumatised shadow of authentic cultural expression, forms that emerged from urgency. Survival architecture.
Yet given the right tools, practices and training, African spatial practice has the potential to create incredibly rich & diverse spatial wisdom regardless of access to resources.
Brikicho holds space for this conversation to unfold. And then asks: what becomes possible when we go beyond surviving? When we begin, deliberately, to build from our own deep intelligence rather than from the edge of what remains after everything else has been taken?
Noelle Oyunga, 2026
Material Skin, Notes on Swahili Plaster Traditions
Field and archival research into Swahili plasterwork as encoded architectural knowledge. On the relationship between surface, material memory, and spatial identity.
Research in ProgressDistress or Design, A Pedagogical Framework
The intellectual foundation for the Field Notes research study. How do we train architecture students to see the difference between buildings that emerged from urgency and buildings that emerged from cultural intention?
Research in Progress