Kabage Karanja is a founder and director of Cave Bureau, a Nairobi based practice of architects and researchers exploring the interconnected relationship between architecture, urbanism, nature and culture. In particular, his work explores the anthropological and geological conditions of landscapes inhabited by both humans and the greater bio mass of diverse life on the planet, that is often disregarded and even denied within the contemporary city. His attention to these disjoined relationships mapped, and reimagined on multiple scales defines the bureau’s work. These studies form part of a broader decoding of the legacy of colonialism on urban and rural settings, explored through drawing, storytelling, construction, and the curation of performative events of resistance within caves, in museums and gallery spaces around the world.

He is a co-curator of the British Pavilion for the 2025 Venice architecture biennale, that aims to map architectures from across the world defined by an embedded relationship to the ground. The conceptual strategy being to reinscribe the British Pavilion by turning it inside out and unearth what acts of decolonial repair might look like when framing a planetary vernacular.

Since 2017 Kabage has led the ‘The Anthropocene Museum’ research and community based practice, coordinating surveys into caves from Africa’s Great Rift Valley, Manhattan, New York, to Sharjah in the UAE. These projects have been published in the co-authored book, Cave_bureau, The Architect’s Studio, by Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark, in 2023, that was published in parallel to the exhibition where Cave_bureau’s work was described as a provocation to test the limits of contemporary architecture, inviting new thinking about how architecture can adapt to a more community-focused, ecologically sensitive, low-carbon future.

In the same year Cave_bureau received a Re:arc institute grant to begin Anthropocene Museum 10.0 titled reversing water scarcity on mount Suswa, in the Great Rift Valley, where they have partnered with the local Maasai community to construct a steam harvester prototype and water ecology infrastructure design. This project includes a multidisciplinary cohort of local experts in geology, hydrology, seismology, landscape design among other contributions to help realize a broader twenty year spanning project to restore the wider water catchment and biodiversity of Mount Suswa’s outer crater.

The Anthropocene museum was also exhibited twice at the Venice architecture biennale, where Cave_bureau received a special mention in 2021 for the installation ‘Obsidian Rain’, and at the Guggenheim Museum in 2020 for the World Around online exhibition during the COVID 19 pandemic.

Recently in 2024, the Museum of Modern Art, New York acquired a series of Cave_bureau’s works and artefacts from the original Anthropocene Museum 1.0 installment, that will be exhibited in autumn 2024 for the ‘Down to Earth’ collection exhibition for two years.

He trained in art at Loughborough University, and then Architecture at Brighton University, Westminster University, and Kingston University, where he eventually qualifying as an architect in 2011 under the Royal Institute of British Architects (riba) in the United kingdom. In the summer of 2022 was an Assistant Adjunct Professor at Columbia University, school of Architecture Preservation and Planning. While in spring 2025 will be a Louis I. Kahn Visiting Assistant Professor of Architectural Design at Yale University.

His work and writing has been published on E-flux The New York Times, Wallpaper, Elle Decor, Dezeen, The Architect’s Newspaper, CNN, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Architectural Review, among others.