Karl Henrik Nøstvik

Karl Henrik Nøstvik reached Kenya in 1965 with the first group of Norwegian experts sent out under the Norwegian aid programme after independence, joining the Ministry of Public Works as a junior architect under David Mutiso, Kenya's first African Chief Architect. When his government contract lapsed he opened his own office in Nairobi and worked from there for the rest of his life, which makes him a Kenyan architect by every measure except passport. He joined Mutiso's Kenyatta International Conference Centre project as it developed and continued on it as a private consultant; the finished building, in three phases between 1967 and 1973, is a cylindrical thirty-two-storey tower faced in pale terracotta, a conical amphitheatre and a cuboid plenary hall. International sources came to credit Nøstvik alone for a design Mutiso maintained was chiefly his own. Nøstvik died in 1992.