Nairobi: A City of Stone, Steel & Grit

By Timothy Wahome

Of late, the Kenya capital, Nairobi has enhanced its status as the creme-de-la-creme of the mortar-and-brick success story so common in the Far-east, the Arab world and North America, namely, skyscrapers.

Following the boom of buildings in the 70’s and 80’s, with a brief burlesque flattening around the ’90s only to boom back after the completion of the Times Tower and the Teleposta Towers, only a short space of years has lapsed and Nairobi is back with mind-boggling pyramidal and block structures.  The crisp symmetrical KCB Tower graced Upper Hill neighborhood to the southwest of the downtown of the city in 2015, side by side with UAP Tower and the tallest tower (in 2017) the Britam building, all in a space of a few kilometers’ radius apart. Though, Hazina Business Centre took centre stage as the highest peak on the concrete jungle in-was it the year 2020?

These are by no means the final word in architectural terms, for the now-undeceived ‘green city in the sun,’ as new structures to blanket the tallest in the continent came up including the Hass development, Pinnacle Tower in the same gilded neighborhood that saw the light and presented Nairobi with the highest manmade structure in Africa, at that time.