Woven Time: How Two JKUAT Students Turned Kenya’s Arid Light into an International Architectural Landmark

Wambugu Maranga and Henry Ronoh presenting their winning entry Woven Time to the international jury in Barcelona. 

Wambugu Maranga and Henry Ronoh, architecture graduates from Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology (JKUAT), have made history as the first Kenyan entrants to win the prestigious Light of Tomorrow by VELUX global competition, emerging as the Regional Winners for Africa in 2026. Their winning project, Woven Time, reimagines how African daylight can be understood and experienced in contemporary architecture, placing a distinctly African perspective on the global architectural stage.

The project was selected in June 2026 during the UIA World Congress of Architects in Barcelona, Spain, from a highly competitive pool of 539 submissions from 345 architecture schools across more than 80 countries. Guided by their lecturer and academic supervisor, Arch. Jerusha Ngungui from the Department of Architecture, the team stood alongside regional winners from Sweden, Ukraine, Chile, and China as the sole winning project from the African continent.

The core mandate of the VELUX Light of Tomorrow award requires students to treat daylight not as a passive background element, but as the central driver of a building’s conceptual framework. For Maranga and Ronoh, they pushed this challenge deeper by grounding their design in the spatial wisdom of Kenya’s northern desert communities. Having studied African architectural history since their second year at JKUAT, both students had long observed a persistent gap in formal design education: the vast majority of indigenous spatial knowledge across Africa remains unwritten.

Behind every great project is dedicated mentorship. Arch. Jerusha Ngungui, lecturer at JKUAT’s Department of Architecture and academic supervisor for the Woven Time project

In Kenya’s northern arid regions, pastoralist communities have historically relied on sunlight as far more than mere illumination. Arid light is a clock, a calendar marking seasonal cycles, and a primary orientation tool across expansive, featureless terrains. Woven Time translates this living relationship into an architectural method. Rather than treating light as a utility to be flicked on or off, the project integrates natural light as a tangible design material, weaving daylight into the structural logic of a space much like these communities’ weave meaning into time itself.

Transforming this philosophical idea into a rigorous proposal required three to four months of research, field documentation, and physical prototyping. The team faced immediate hurdles due to the lack of local archival documentation on northern desert building traditions. Paradoxically, the most comprehensive historical records available were housed thousands of miles away at ETH Zurich in Switzerland. Bridging this gap required traveling directly to Kenya’s remote northern landscapes, journeys marked by severe transport logistics, delays, and harsh environmental conditions.

Yet, the pair noted that the physical travel was secondary to the challenge of communication. The team had to compress months of cultural narrative, site observations, daylight physics, and complex environmental metrics onto a single competition display panel meant to capture an international jury’s evaluation in seconds.

“The research was extensive, but our biggest test was clarity. We had to take months of fieldwork, historical context, and technical lighting calculations and tell a single, compelling story on one competition board that an international judge could grasp in seconds.” Wambugu Maranga, Lead Student Architect & Co-Creator of Woven Time.

On the other hand, “In northern Kenya, light isn’t a switch you flip; it Is how life is structured. We wanted to prove that African indigenous knowledge isn’t just history to be preserved in books, but a living architectural language that can compete on the world stage.” Henry Ronoh, Lead Student Architect & Co-Creator of Woven Time

For Arch. Ngungui, this victory was the culmination of years of academic development. Having taught Maranga and Ronoh in their third-year daylighting theory course and later in fourth-year studio, she served as their supervising teacher and academic sponsor.

Following her introduction and the students’ breakthrough, Arch. Ngungui reflected on guiding the pair through the rigorous process:

“I was very surprised because the project came after they had done their sixth-year presentation. That is a stage where you really dot not expect students to come back. At that point you think they have nothing to do with school, especially after six years, but to my surprise they were still driving themselves and were ready to push and put themselves out there.”

She went on to say,” By the time they were coming to me, they had really interrogated their concept. It was very interesting talking about light and weaving it into the building design, not using light as a medium or a utility, but as a design material. Our collaborative focus was on challenging that design concept against the daylighting principles that they had learned. It was important for them to synthesize all these concepts, the complex environmental data, and the scientific aspects of lighting into a cohesive narrative that can be explained even to a non-technical person.”

Furthermore, she observed how the mentorship provided an opportunity to look back on this journey, “Mentorship is not like a one-off thing. It’s a continuous process of teaching them how to think, like their long-term capacity to think and be innovative and also execute ideas entirely on their own. I’m extremely, extremely proud of these guys. This win is a reflection of their creativity, their independence, their ownership of their project. It has proven that JKUAT really belongs to an international stage, not just within the region.”

Wambugu Maranga (left) and Henry Ronoh (right) display their official Regional Winner certificates at the VELUX 2026 ceremony in Barcelona, representing the sole winning entry from the African continent.