Nicholas Frayne: Spaces of Violence and Healing: the material agency of architecture in justice in Kenya

Supervisor: Dr Irit Katz

Research overview:

Peacebuilding and the pursuit of justice are critical to our collective futures, and yet remain underexplored within the field of architecture. In spaces where violence has happened, the links between justice and architecture are particularly salient. While it is widely acknowledged that such sites are important for the memorialization and addressal of past injustices, the physical spaces themselves are often viewed as evidentiary, narrative, or organizational backgrounds to these practices, and not active collaborators in them. Redressing this theoretical lacuna through a combination of postcolonial theory and critical phenomenology, my research examines the material agency of sites of violence in negotiating sociopolitical orientations and mediating legacies of conflict. The premise is that architectural material is an active collaborator in the sociopolitical dynamics that lie at the heart of justice.

This research explores this question through Nyayo House, a former torture centre in the basement of an office tower in downtown Nairobi that stands at the cusp of memorialization amid ongoing injustices. Employing a qualitative methodology that combines interviews, detailed architectural documentation and collective, intergenerational architectural design, this study embraces the complex entanglements of temporality, materiality, and justice in the Kenyan context to better understand how architecture might contribute towards a more just future.

Biography:

Funded by the Cambridge Trust, the Smuts Memorial Fund, and a SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship, Nicholas’ architectural scholarship is complemented by several years of practical experience at internationally recognized firms. Having won awards for design and teaching at the University of Waterloo, where he studied at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, Nicholas has also notably published his research on memorial architecture and justice in the Journal of Architecture and Architecture and Culture, before pursuing his PhD.