Designing Justice: The Politics of Collaborative Architectural Design at the Former Torture Chambers at Nyayo House

In 2013, the Kenyan Truth, Justice, and Reconciliation Commission (TJRC) recommended that the former torture chambers at Nyayo House be transformed into a public memorial. The chambers were used under the Moi regime (1978–2002) to torture political dissidents. To date, memorialisation remains deferred amid ongoing state injustices. Working from the specificities of the Kenyan political context, this paper examines the politics of co-design through an intergenerational dialogue and design workshop on Nyayo House, run in Nairobi in 2024. Bringing together survivors and young Kenyans, this workshop was structured in two parts: the morning as a conventional group dialogue and the afternoon as a co-design session for the creation of a memorial at Nyayo House. By examining this workshop through first-hand descriptions and interviews with participants, this paper critically investigates (1) how knowledge transmission diverges between dialogue and architectural co-creation, and (2) what the political effects of such knowledge transmission might be. It engages with Amartya Sen’s deliberative idea of justice, Hannah Arendt’s conception of political innovation, and Achille Mbembe’s philosophy of disenclosure to understand the multiple forms of justice at play. Dialogue appears as a process of augmentation that aids in the implementation of justice as defined through the TJRC, while co-design is found to go beyond extant political relations as a politics of innovation. This recasts justice as a futural practice that opens up new solidarities and imaginaries of justice, situating co-design as a key practice for justice in contexts such as Kenya, where memorialisation can be deployed to enact political closure. 

Nicholas Forrest Frayne

Candidate for a PhD in Architecture and SSHRC Doctoral Fellow at the University of Cambridge

Nicholas is a candidate for a PhD in Architecture and SSHRC Doctoral Fellow at the University of Cambridge, where he studies how the architectural remnants of political violence impact extra-legal conceptions and negotiations of justice in sub-Saharan Africa. Building on degrees in architecture from the University of Waterloo and experience at architecture firms in North America, Nicholas’s research on justice, memory, and architecture has been published in the top journals in the field. He has also served as co-editor in chief of the 33rd issue of Scroope: the Cambridge Architecture Journal and is the winner of the 2025 Hawksmoor Medal. His current research combines phenomenology and postcolonial theory to understand and place the dynamics of African sites of political violence into wider debates on the formative roles that architecture might play in justice. As such, he is concerned with the relationships between architectural materiality, justice, and the politics of time.